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PREFACE. 



At the close of a letter addressed by Dickens to his friend 
John Forster, but not to be found in the English editions of 
the Life, the writer adds to his praises of the biography of 
Goldsmith these memorable words : "I desire no better for my 
fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of 
my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic." 
Dickens was a man of few close friendships — "his breast," he 
said, "would not hold many people" — but, of these friend- 
ships, that with Forster was one of the earliest, as it was one 
of the most enduring. To Dickens, at least, his future biogra- 
pher must have been the embodiment of two qualities rarely 
combined in equal measure — discretion and candour. In lit- 
erary matters his advice was taken almost as often as it was 
given, and nearly every proof-sheet of nearly every work of 
Dickens passed through his faithful helpmate's hands. Nor 
were there many important decisions formed by Dickens con- 
cerning himself iu the course of his manhood to which Forster 
was a stranger, though, unhappily, he more than once coun- 
selled in vain. 

On Mr. Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, together with the 
three volumes of Letters collected by Dickens's eldest daughter 
and his sister-in-law — his "dearest and best friend" — it is 
superfluous to state that the biographical portion of the follow- 
ing essay is mainly based. ■ It may be superfluous, but it can- 
not be considered impertinent, if I add that the shortcomings 
of the Life have, in my opinion, been more frequently pro- 
claimed than defined ; and that its merits are those of its author 
as well as of its subject. 

My sincere thanks are due for various favours shown to me 
iu connexion with the production of this little volume by Miss 



DICKENS. 



CHAPTER I. 

BEFORE " PICKWICK." 

[1812-1836.] 

Charles Dickens, the eldest son, and the second/oFth'e 
eight children, of John and Elizabeth Dickens, was horn 
at Landport, a suburb of Portsca, on Friday, February 
7, 1812. His baptismal names were Charles John Huff- 
liam. His father, at that time a clerk in the Navy Pay 
Office, and employed in the Portsmouth Dock-yard, was 
recalled to London when his eldest son was only two years 
of age ; and two years afterwards was transferred to 
Chatham, where he resided with his family from 1816 to 
1821. Thus Chatham, and the more venerable city of 
Rochester adjoining, with their neighbourhood of chalk 
hills and deep green lanes and woodland and marshes, be- 
came, in the words of Dickens's biographer, the birthplace 
of his fancy. He looked upon himself as, to all intents 
and purposes, a Kentish man born and bred, and his heart 
was always in this particular corner of the incomparable 
county. Again and again, after Mr. Alfred Jingle's spas- 
modic eloquence had, in the very first number of Pickwick, 



2 DICKENS. [chap. 

epitomised the antiquities and comforts of Rochester, al- 
ready the scene of one of the Sketches, Dickens returned 
to the local associations of his early childhood. It was at 
Chatham that poor little David Copperfield, on his solitary 
tramp to Dover, slept his Sunday night's sleep "near a 
cannon, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps ;" 
and in many a Christmas narrative or uncommercial etch- 
ing the familiar features of town and country, of road and 
river, were reproduced, before in Great Expectations they 
suggested some of the most picturesque effects of his 
later art, and before in his last unfinished romance his 
faithful fancy once more haunted the well-known pre- 
cincts. During the last thirteen years of his life he was 
again an inhabitant of the loved neighbourhood where, 
with the companions of his mirthful idleness, he had so 
often made holiday ; where, when hope was young, he 
had spent his honey-moon ; and whither, after his last rest- 
less wanderings, he was to return, to seek such repose as 
he would allow himself, and to die. But, of course, the 
daily life of the " very queer small boy " of that early 
time is only quite incidentally to be associated with the 
grand gentleman's house on Gad's Hill, where his father, 
little thinking that his son was to act over again the story 
of Warren Hastings and Daylesford, had told him he 
might some day come to live, if he were to be very perse- 
vering, and to work hard. The family abode was in 
Ordnance (not St. Mary's) Place, at Chatham, amidst sur- 
roundings classified in Mr. Pickwick's notes as " appear- 
ing to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, offices, and 
dock-yard men." But though the half-mean, half-pictu- 
resque aspect of the Chatham streets may already at an 
early age have had its fascination for Dickens, yet his 
childish fancy was fed as fully as were his powers of ob- 



i.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 8 

scrvation. Having learned reading from his mother, he 
was sent with his elder sister, Fanny, to a day-school kept 
in Gibraltar Place, New Road, by Mr. William Giles, the 
eldest son and namesake of a worthy Baptist minister, 
whose family had formed an intimate acquaintance with 
their neighbours in Ordnance Row. The younger Giles 
children were pupils at the school of their elder brother 
with Charles and Fanny Dickens, and thus naturally their 
constant playmates. In later life Dickens preserved a 
grateful remembrance, at times refreshed by pleasant com- 
munications between the families, of the training he had 
received from Mr. William Giles, an intelligent as well as 
generous man, who, recognising his pupil's abilities, seems 
to have resolved that they should not lie fallow for want 
of early cultivation. Nor does there appear to be the 
slightest reason for supposing that this period of his life 
was anything but happy. For his sister Fanny he always 
preserved a tender regard ; and a touching little paper, 
written by him after her death in womanhood, relates how 
the two children used to watch the stars together, and 
make friends with one in particular, as belonging to them- 
selves. ; But obviously he did not lack playmates of his 
own sex ; and it was no doubt chiefly because his tastes 
made him disinclined to take much part in the rougher 
sports of his school-fellows, that he found plenty of time 
for amusing himself in his own way. And thus it came 
to pass that already as a child he followed his own likings 
in the two directions from which they were never very 
materially to swerve. He once said of himself that he 
had been " a writer when a mere baby, an actor always." ' 
Of these two passions he could always, as a child and 
as a man, be " happy with either," and occasionally with 
both at the same time. In his tender years he was taken 



4 DICKENS. [chap. 

by a kinsman, a Sandhurst cadet, to the theatre, to see the 
legitimate drama acted, and was disillusioned by visits be- 
hind the scenes at private theatricals; while his own ju- 
venile powers as a teller of stories and singer of comic 
songs (he was possessed, says one who remembers him, of 
a sweet treble voice) were displayed on domestic chairs 
and tables, and then in amateur plays with his school-fel- 
lows. He also wrote a — not strictly original — tragedy, 
which is missing among his Reprinted Pieces. There is 
nothing unique in these childish doings, nor in the cir- 
cumstance that he was an eager reader of works of fic- 
tion ; but it is noteworthy that chief among the books to 
which he applied himself,'in a small neglected bookroom 
in his father's house, were those to which his allegiance 
remained true through much of his career as an author. 
Besides books of travel, which he says had a fascination 
for his mind from his earliest childhood, besides the "Ara- 
bian Nights" and kindred tales, and the English Essayists, 
he read Fielding and Smollett, and Cervantes and Le Sage, 
in all innocence of heart, as well as Mrs. Inchbald's collec- 
tion of farces, in all contentment of spirit. Inasmuch as 
he was no great reader in the days of his authorship, and 
had to go through hard times of his own before, it was 
well that the literature of his childhood was good of its 
kind, and that where it was not good it was at least gay. 
Dickens afterwards made it an article of his social creed 
that the imagination of the young needs nourishment as 
much as their bodies require food and clothing; and he 
had reason for gratefully remembering that at all events 
the imaginative part of his education had escaped neglect. 
But these pleasant early days came to a sudden end. 
In the year 1821 his family returned to London, and soon 
his experiences of trouble began. Misfortune pursued the 



i.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 5 

elder Dickens to town, his salary Laving been decreased 
already at Chatham in consequence of oue of the early 
efforts at economical reform. lie found a shabby home 
for his family in Bayham Street, Camden Town ; and here, 
what with the pecuniary embarrassments in which he was 
perennially involved, and what with the easy disposition 
with which he was blessed by way of compensation, he 
allowed his son's education to take care of itself. John 
Dickens appears to have been an honourable as well as a 
kindly man. His son always entertained an affectionate 
regard for him, and carefully arranged for the comfort of 
his latter years ; nor would it be fair, because of a similar- 
ity in their, experiences, and in the grandeur of their habit- 
ual phraseology, to identify him absolutely with the im- 
mortal Mr. Micawber. Still less, except in certain details 
of manner and incident, can the character of the elder 
Dickens be thought to have suggested that of the pitiful 
" Father of the Marshalsea," to which prison, almost as 
famous in English fiction as it is in English history, the 
unlucky navy-clerk was consigned a year after his return 
to London. 

Every effort had been made to stave off the evil day ; 
and little Charles, whose eyes Avere always wide open, and 
who had begun to write descriptive sketches of odd per- 
sonages among his acquaintance, had become familiar with 
the inside of a pawnbroker's shop, and had sold the pa- 
ternal " library " piecemeal to the original of the drunken 
second-hand bookseller, with whom David Copperfield 
dealt as Mr. Micawber's representative. But neither these 
sacrifices nor Mrs. Dickens's abortive efforts at setting up 
an educational establishment had been of avail. Her hus- 
band's creditors would not give him time ; and a dark 
period began for the family, and more especially for the 



6 DICKENS. [chai\ 

little eldest son, now ten years old, in which, as lie after- 
wards wrote, in bitter anguish of remembrance, "but for 
the mercy of God, he might easily have become, for any 
care that was taken of him, a little robber or a little 
vagabond." 

Forster has printed the pathetic fragment of autobiog- 
raphy, communicated to him by Dickens five-and-twenty 
years after the period to which it refers, and subsequent- 
ly incorporated with but few changes in the Personal His- 
tory of David Copperfield. Who can forget the thrill with 
which he first learned the well-kept secret that the story of 
the solitary child, left a prey to the cruel chances of the 
London streets, was an episode in the life of Charles Dick- 
ens himself? Between fact and fiction there was but a 
difference of names. Murdstone & Grinby's wine ware- 
house down in Blackfriars was Jonathan Warren's black- 
ing warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, in which a place had 
been found for the boy by a relative, a partner in the con- 
cern ; and the bottles he had to paste over with labels 
were in truth blacking-pots. But the menial work and 
the miserable pay, the uncongenial companionship during 
worktime, and the speculative devices of the dinner-hour 
were the same in each case. At this time, after his fam- 
ily had settled itself in the Marshalsea, the haven open to 
the little waif at night was a lodging in Little College 
Street, Camden Town, presenting even fewer attractions 
than Mr. Micawber's residence in Windsor Terrace, and 
kept by a lady afterwards famous under the name of Mrs. 
Pipchin. His Sundays were spent at home in the prison. 
On his urgent remonstrance — " the first I had ever made 
about my lot" — concerning the distance from his family 
at which he was left through the week, a back attic was 
found for him in Lant Street, in the Borough, •" where 



i ] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 7 

Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards ;" and he now 
breakfasted and supped with his parents in their apart- 
ment. Here they lived in fair comfort, waited upon by 
a faithful " orfling," who had accompanied the family and 
its fortunes from Chatham, and who is said by Forster 
to have her part in the character of the Marchioness. 
Finally, after the prisoner had obtained his discharge, 
and had removed with his family to the Lant Street lodg- 
ings, a quarrel occurred between the elder Dickens and 
his cousin, and the boy was in consequence taken away 
from the business. 

He had not been ill-treated there ; nor indeed is it ill- 
treatment which leads to David Copperfield's running 
away in the story. Nevertheless, it is not strange that 
Dickens should have looked back with a bitterness very 
unusual in him upon the bad old days of his childish soli- 
tude and degradation. He never "forgot" his mother's 
having wished him to remain in the warehouse ; the sub- 
ject of his employment there was never afterwards men- 
tioned in the family ; he could not bring himself to go 
near old Hungerford Market so long as it remained stand- 
ing ; and to no human being, not even to his wife, did he 
speak of this passage in his life until he narrated it in the 
fragment of autobiography which he confided to his trusty 
friend. Such a sensitiveness is not hard to explain ; for 
no man is expected to dilate upon the days " when he 
lived among the beggars in St. Mary Axe," and it is only 
the Bounderbies of society who exult, truly or falsely, in 
the sordid memories of the time before they became rich 
or powerful. And if the sharp experiences of his child- 
hood might have ceased to be resented by one whom the 
world on the whole treated so kindly, at least they left his 
heart unhardened, and helped to make him ever tender to 



8 DICKENS. [chap. 

the poor and weak, because he too had after a fashion 
" eaten his bread with tears " when a puny child. . 

A happy accident having released the David Copper- 
field of actual life from his unworthy bondage, he was put 
in the way of an education such as at that time was the 
lot of most boys of the class to which he belonged. " The 
world has done much better since in that way, and will 
do far better yet," he writes at the close of his descrip- 
tion of Our School, the Wellington House Academy," sit- 
uate near that point in the Hampstead Road where modest 
gentility and commercial enterprise touch hands. Other 
testimony confirms his sketch of the ignorant and brutal 
head-master; and doubtless this worthy and his usher, 
" considered to know everything as opposed to the chief 
who was considered to know nothiug," furnished some of 
the features in the portraits of Mr. Creakle and Mr. Mell. 
But it has been very justly doubted by an old school- 
fellow whether the statement " We were First Boy " is 
to be regarded as strictly historical. If Charles Dickens, 
when he entered the school, was " put into Virgil," he was 
not put there to much purpose. On the other hand, with 
the return of happier days had come the resumption of 
the old amusements which were to grow into the occu- 
pations of his life. A club was founded among the 
boys at Wellington House for the express purpose of 
circulating short tales written by him, and he was the 
manager of the private theatricals which they contrived 
to set on foot. 

After two or three years of such work and play it 
became necessary for Charles Dickens once more to think 
of earning his bread. His father, who had probably lost 
his official post at the time when, in Mr. Micawber's phrase, 
" hope sunk beneath the horizon," was now seeking em- 



i.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 

ploy merit as a parliamentary reporter, and must have re- 
joiced when a Gray's Inn solicitor of his acquaintance, 
attracted by the bright, clever looks of his son, took the 
lad into his office as a clerk at a modest weekly salary. 
His office associates here were perhaps a grade or two 
above those of the blacking warehouse ; but his danger 
now lay rather in the direction of the vulgarity which he 
afterwards depicted in such samples of the profession as 
Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling. He is said to have frequent- 
ed, in company with a fellow-clerk, one of the minor thea- 
tres, and even occasionally to have acted there ; and assur- 
edly it must have been personal knowledge which suggest- 
ed the curiously savage description of Private Theatres in 
the Sketches by Boz, the all but solitary unkindly refer- 
ence to theatrical amusements in his works. But what- 
ever his experiences of this kind may have been, he passed 
unscathed through them ; and during the year and a half 
of his clerkship picked up sufficient knowledge of the 
technicalities of the law to be able to assail its enormities 
without falling into rudimentary errors about it, and suffi- 
cient knowledge of lawyers and lawyers' men to fill a 
whole chamber in his gallery of characters. 

Oddly enough, it was, after all, the example of the father 
that led the son into the line of life from which he was 
easily to pass into the career where success and fame 
awaited him. The elder Dickens having obtained employ- 
ment as a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Herald, 
his son, who was living with him in Bentinck Street, Man- 
chester Square, resolved to essay the same laborious craft. 
He was by this time nearly seventeen years of age, and 
already we notice in him what were to remain, through 
life, two of his most marked characteristics — strength of 

will, and a determination, if he did a thing at all, to do it 
B 



10 DICKENS. [chap. 

thoroughly. The art of short-hand, which he now resolute- 
ly set himself to master, was in those days no easy study, 
though, possibly, in looking back upon his first efforts, 
David Copperfield overestimated the difficulties which he 
had conquered with the help of love and Traddles. But 
Dickens, whose education no Dr. Strong had completed, 
perceived that in order to succeed as a reporter of the 
highest class he needed something besides the knowledge 
of short-hand. In a word, he lacked reading; and this 
deficiency he set himself to supply as best he could by a 
constant attendance at the British Museum. Those critics 
who have dwelt on the fact that the reading of Dickens 
was neither very great nor very extensive, have insisted on 
what is not less true than obvious ; but he had this one 
quality of the true lover of reading, that he never profess- 
ed a familiarity with that of which he knew little or noth- 
ing. He continued his visits to the Museum, even when 
in 1828 he had become a reporter in Doctors' Commons. 
With this occupation he had to remain as content as he 
could for nearly two years. Once more David Copper- 
field, the double of Charles Dickens in his youth, will rise 
to the memory of every one of his readers. For not only 
was his soul seized with a weariness of Consistory, Arches, 
Delegates, and the rest of it, to which he afterwards gave 
elaborate expression in his story, but his heart was full of 
its first love. In later days he was not of opinion that 
he had loved particularly wisely ; but how well he had 
loved is known to every one who after him has lost his 
heart to Dora. Nothing came of the fancy, and in course 
of time he had composure enough to visit the lady who 
had been its object in the company of his wife. He found 
that Ji[> was stuffed as well as dead, and that Dora had 
faded into Flora ; for it was as such that, not very chival- 



/.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 11 

rously, lie could bring himself to describe her, for the 
second time, in Little Dorrit. 

Before at last he was engaged as a reporter on a news- 
paper, he had, and not for a moment only, thought of 
turning aside to another profession. It was the profes- 
sion to which — uncommercially — he was attached during 
so great a part of his life, that when he afterwards created 
for himself a stage of his own, he seemed to be but follow- 
ing an irresistible fascination. His best friend described 
him to me as " a born actor ;" and who needs to be told 
that the world falls into two divisions only — those whose 
place is before the foot-lights, and those whose place is be- 
hind them ? His love of acting was stronger than him- 
self ; and I doubt whether he ever saw a play successfully 
performed without longing to be in and of it. "Assump- 
tion," he wrote in after days to Lord Lytton, " has charms 
for me — I hardly know for how many wild reasons — so 
delightful that I feel a loss of, oh ! I can't say wbat ex- 
quisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being some one in 
voice, etc., not at all like myself." He loved the theatre 
and everything which savoured of histrionics with an in- 
tensity not even to be imagined by those who have never 
felt a touch of the same passion. He had that " belief in 
a play " which he so pleasantly described as one of the 
characteristics of his life-long friend, the great painter, 
Clarkson Stanfield. And he had that unextinguishable 
interest in both actors and acting which makes a little 
separate world of the "quality." One of the staunchest 
friendships of his life was that with the foremost English 
tragedian of his age, Macready ; one of the delights of his 
last years was his intimacy with another well-known actor, 
the late Mr. Fcchter. No performer, however, was so ob' 
scure or so feeble as to be outside the pale of his sympa- 



12 DICKENS. [chap. 

thy. His books teem with kindly likenesses of all man- 
ner of entertainers and entertainments — from Mr. Vincent 
Crummies and the more or less legitimate drama, down to 
Mr. Sleary's horse-riding and Mrs. Jarley's wax-work. He 
has a friendly feeling for Chops the dwarf, and for Pickle- 
son the giant ; and in his own quiet Broadstairs he cannot 
help tumultously applauding a young lady " who goes 
into the den of ferocious lions, tigers, leopards, etc., and 
pretends to go to sleep upon the principal lion, upon 
which a rustic keeper, who speaks through his nose, ex- 
claims, ' Behold the abazid power of woobad!' " He was 
unable to sit through a forlorn performance at a wretched 
country theatre without longing to add a sovereign to the 
four-and-nincpence which he had made out in the house 
when he entered, and which " had warmed up in the 
course of the evening to twelve shillings;" and in Bow 
Street, near his office, he was beset by appeals such as that 
of an aged and greasy suitor for an engagement as Panta- 
loon: "Mr. Dickens, you know our profession, sir — no one 
knows it better, sir — there is no right feeling in it. I was 
Harlequin on your own circuit, sir, for five - and - thirty 
years, and was displaced by a boy, sir ! — a boy !" Nor did 
his disposition change when he crossed the seas ; the 
streets he first sees in the United States remind him irre- 
sistibly of the set-scene in a London pantomime ; and at 
Verona his interest is divided between Romeo and Juliet 
and the vestiges of an equestrian troupe in the amphi- 
theatre. 

What success Dickens might have achieved as an actor 
it is hardly to the present purpose to inquire. A word 
will be said below of the success he achieved as an ama- 
teur actor and manager, and in his more than half- dra- 
matic readings. But, the influence of early associations 



i.J BEFORE "PICKWICK." 13 

and personal feelings apart, it would seem that the artists 
of the stage whom he most admired were not those of the 
highest type. He was subdued by the genius of Frederic 
Lemaitre, but blind and deaf to that of Ristori. " Sound 
melodrama and farce " were the dramatic species which 
he affected, and in which as a professional actor he might 
have excelled. His intensity might have gone for much 
in the one, and his versatility and volubility for more in 
the other ; and in both, as indeed in any kind of play or 
part, his thoroughness, which extended itself to every de- 
tail of performance or make-up, must have stood him in 
excellent stead. As it was, he was preserved for literal 
ture. But he had carefully prepared himself for his in- 
tended venture, and when he sought an engagement at 
Covent Garden, a preliminary interview with the manager 
was postponed only on account of the illness of the ap- 
plicant. 

Before the next theatrical season opened he had at last 
— in the year 1831 — obtained employment as a parlia- 
mentary reporter, and after some earlier engagements he 
became, in 1834, one of the reporting staff of the famous 
Whig Morning Chronicle, then in its best days under the 
editorship of Mr. John Black. Now, for the first time in 
his life, he had an opportunity of putting forth the en- 
ergy that was in him. He shrank from none of the diffi- 
culties which in those days attended the exercise of his 
craft. They were thus depicted by himself, when a few 
yens before his death he' "held a brief for his brothers" 
at the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund : " I have of- 
ten transcribed for the printer from my short-hand notes 
important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy 
was required, and a mistake in which would have been to 
a young man severely compromising; writing on the palm 



14 DICKENS. [chap. 

of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post- 
chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and 
through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate 
of fifteen miles an hour. ... I have worn my knees by 
writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of 
the old House of Commons ; and I have worn my feet by 
standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House 
of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so 
many sheep kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might 
want restuffing. Returning home from excited political 
meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I 
do verily believe I have been upset in almost every de- 
scription of vehicle known in" this country. I have been 
in my time belated on miry by-roads, towards the small 
hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless car- 
riage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and 
have got back in time for publication, to be received with 
never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming 
in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I 
ever knew." Thus early had Dickens learnt the secret of 
throwing; himself into any pursuit once taken up by him, 
and of half achieving his task by the very heartiness with 
which he set about it. When at the close of the parlia- 
mentary session of the year 1S36 his labours as a reporter 
came to an end, he was held to have no equal in the gal- 
lery. During this period his naturally keen powers of ob- 
servation must have been sharpened and strengthened, and 
that quickness of decision acquired which constitutes, per- 
haps, the most valuable lesson that journalistic practice of 
any kind can teach to a young man of letters. To Dick- 
ens's experience as a reporter may likewise be traced no 
small part of his political creed, in which there was a good 
deal of infidelity ; or, at all events, his determined con- 



i] BEFORE " PICKWICK." 15 

tempt for the parliamentary style proper, whether in the 
mouth of " Thisman " or of " Thatman," and his rooted 
dislike of the "cheap-jacks" and "national dustmen" 
whom he discerned among our orators and legislators. 
There is probably no very great number of Members of 
Parliament who are heroes to those who wait attendance 
on their words. Moreover, the period of Dickens's most 
active labours as a reporter was one that succeeded a time 
of great political excitement; and when men wish thank- 
fully to rest after deeds, words are in season. 

Meanwhile, very tentatively and with a very imperfect 
consciousness of the significance for himself of his first 
steps on a slippery path, Dickens had begun the real 
career of his life. It has been seen how he had been a 
writer as a " baby," as a school-boy, and as a lawyer's 
clerk, and the time had come when, like all writers, he 
wished to see himself in print. In December, 1833, the 
Monthly Magazine published a paper which he had drop- 
ped into its letter-box, and with eyes " dimmed with joy 
and pride" the young author beheld his first-born in print. 
The paper, called A Dinner at Poplar Walk, was after- 
wards reprinted in the Sketches by Boz under the title of 
Mr. Minns and his Cousin, and is laughable enough. His 
success emboldened him to send further papers of a simi- 
lar character to the same magazine, which published ten 
contributions of his by February, 1835. That which ap- 
peared in August, 1834, was the first signed "Boz," a 
nickname given by him in his boyhood to a favourite 
brother. Since Dickens' used this signature not only as 
the author of the Sketches and a few other minor produc- 
tions, but also as "editor" of the Pickwick Papers, it is 
nol surprising that, especially among his admirers on the 
< iontinent and in America, the name should have clung to 



16 DICKENS. [ciiap. 

him so tenaciously. It was on a steamboat near Niagara 
that he heard from his state-room a gentleman complain- 
ing to his wife : " Boz keeps himself very close." 

But the Monthly Magazine, though warmly welcoming 
its young contributor's lively sketches, could not afford 
to pay for them. He was therefore glad to conclude an 
arrangement with Mr. George Hogarth, the conductor of 
the Evening Chronicle, a paper in connexion with the 
great morning journal on the reporting staff of which he 
was engaged. He had gratuitously contributed a sketch 
to the evening paper as a personal favour to Mr. Hogarth, 
and the latter readily proposed to the proprietors of the 
Morning Chronicle that Dickens should be duly remu- 
nerated for this addition to his regular labours. With 
a salary of seven instead of, as heretofore, five guineas 
a week, and settled in chambers in Furnival's Inn — one 
of those old legal inns which he loved so well — he might 
already in this year, 1835, consider himself on the high- 
road to prosperity. By the beginning of 1836 the 
Sketches by Boz printed in the Evening Chronicle were 
already numerous enough, and their success was sufficient- 
ly established to allow of his arranging for their republi- 
cation. They appeared in two volumes, with etchings by 
Cruikshank, and the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds 
was paid to him for the copyright. The stepping-stones 
had been found and passed, and on the last day of March, 
which saw the publication of the first number of the Pick- 
wick Papers, he stood in the field of fame and fortune. 
Three days afterwards Dickens married Catherine Ho- 
garth, the eldest daughter of the friend who had so effi- 
ciently aided him in his early literary ventures. Mr. 
George Hogarth's name thus links together the names of 
two masters of English fiction ; for Lockhart speaks of 



I.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 17 

him when a writer to the signet in Edinburgh as one of 
the intimate friends of Scott. Dickens's apprenticeship as 
an author was over almost as soon as it was begun ; and 
he had found the way short from obscurity to the daz- 
zling light of popularity. As for the Sketches by Boz, 
their author soon repurchased the copyright for more than 
thirteen times the sum which had been paid to him for it. 
In their collected form these Sketches modestly de- 
scribed themselves as "illustrative of every-day life and 
eYery-day people." Herein they only prefigured the more 
famous creations of their writer, whose genius was never 
so happy as when lighting up, now the humorous, now 
what he chose to term the romantic, side of familiar 
things. The curious will find little difficulty in tracing 
in these outlines, often rough and at times coarse, the 
groundwork of more than one finished picture of later 
date. Not a few of the most peculiar features of Dickens's 
humour are already here, together with not a little of his 
most characteristic pathos. It is true that in these early 
Sketches the latter is at times strained, but its power is 
occasionally beyond denial, as, for instance, in the brief 
narrative of the death of the hospital patient. On the 
other hand, the humour — more especially that of the 
Tales — is not of the most refined sort, and often degen- 
erates in the direction of boisterous farce. The style, too, 
though in general devoid of the pretentiousness which is 
the bane of "light" journalistic writing, has a taint of 
vulgarity about it, very . pardonable under the circum- 
stances, but generally absent from Dickens's later works. 
Weak puns are not unfrequent; and the diction but rarely 
reaches that exquisite felicity of comic phrase in which 
Pickwick and its successors excel. For the rest, Dickens's 
favourite passions and favourite aversions alike reflect 



18 DICKENS. [chap. 

themselves here in small. In the description of the elec- 
tion for beadle he ridicules the tricks and the manners 
of political party-life, and his love of things theatrical has 
its full freshness upon it — however he may pretend at 
Astley's that his " histrionic taste is gone," and that it is 
the audience which chiefly delights him. But of course 
the gift which these Sketches pre-eminently revealed in 
their author was a descriptive power that seemed to lose 
sight of nothing characteristic in the object described, and 
of nothing humorous in an association suggested by it. 
Whether his theme was street or river, a Christmas dinner 
or the extensive groves of the illustrious dead (the old 
clothes shops in Monmouth Street), he reproduced it in 
all its shades and colours, and under a hundred aspects, 
fanciful as well as real. How inimitable, for instance, is 
the sketch of " the last cab-driver, and the first omnibus 
cad," whose earlier vehicle, the omnipresent "red cab," 
was not the gondola, hut the very fire-ship of the London 
streets. 

Dickens himself entertained no high opinion of these 
youthful efforts ; and in this he showed the consciousness 
of the true artist, that masterpieces are rarely thrown off 
at hazard. But though much of the popularity of the 
Sketches may be accounted for by the fact that common- 
place people love to read about commonplace people and 
things, the greater part of it is due to genuine literary 
merit. The days of half-price in theatres have followed 
the days of coaching ; " Honest Tom " no more paces the 
lobby in a black coat with velvet facings and cuff's, and a 
D'Orsay hat; the Hickses of the present time no longer 
quote "Don Juan" over boarding-house dinner -tables; 
and the young ladies in Camberwell no longer compare 
young men iji attitudes to Lord Byron, or to " Satan " 



I.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 19 

Montgomery. But the Sketches by Boz have survived 
their birth-time ; and they deserve to be remembered 
among the rare instances in which a young author has no 
sooner begun to write than he has shown a knowledge of 
his real strength. As yet, however, this sudden favourite 
of the public was unaware of the range to which his 
powers were to extend, and of the height to which they 
were to mount 



CHAPTER IT. 

FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 

[1836-1841.] 

Even in those years of which the record is brightest in 
the story of his life, Charles Dickens, like the rest of the 
world, had his share of troubles — troubles great and small, 
losses which went home to his heart, and vexations mani- 
fold in the way of business. But in the history of his 
early career as an author the word failure has no place. 

Not that the Posthumous Papers of the Pickiviek Club, 
published as they were in monthly numbers, at once took 
the town by storm ; for the public needed two or three 
months to make up its mind that " Boz " was equal to an 
effort considerably in advance of his Sketches. But when 
the popularity of the serial was once established, it grew 
with extraordinary rapidity until it reached an altogether 
unprecedented height. He would be a bold man who 
should declare that its popularity has very materially 
diminished at the present day. Against the productions 
of Pickwick, and of other works of amusement of which 
it was the prototype, Dr. Arnold thought himself bound 
seriously to contend among the boys Of Rugby ; and 
twenty years later young men at the university talked 
nothing but Pickwick, and quoted nothing but Pickiviek, 
and the wittiest of undergraduates set the world at large 



chap, n.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. ?,t 

an examination paper in Pickwick, over which pretentions 
half-knowledge may puzzle, unable accurately to " describe 
the common Profeel-machine," or to furnish a satisfactory 
definition of " a red-faced Nixon." No changes in man- 
ners and customs have interfered with the hold of the 
work upon nearly all classes of readers at home ; and no 
translation has been dull enough to prevent its being 
relished even in countries where all English manners and 
customs must seem equally uninteresting or equally absurb. 
So extraordinary has been the popularity of this more 
than thrice fortunate book, that the ^wildest legends have 
grown up as to the history of its origin. The facts, how- 
ever, as stated by Dickens himself, are few and plain. At- 
tracted by the success of the Sketches, Messrs. Chapman & 
Hall proposed to him that he should write "something" 
in monthly numbers to serve as a vehicle for certain 
plates to be executed by the comic draughtsman, Mr. R. 
Seymour ; and either the publishers or the artist suggest- 
ed as a kind of leading notion, the idea of a " Nimrod 
Club " of unlueky sportsmen. The proposition was at 
Pickens's suggestion so modified that the plates were " to 
arise naturally out of the text," the range of the latter be- 
ing left open to him. This explains why the rather artificial 
machinery of a club was maintained, and why Mr. Winkle's 
misfortunes by flood and field hold their place by the side 
of the philanthropical meanderings of Mr. Pickwick and 
the amorous experiences of Mr. Tupman. An original 
was speedily found for the pictorial presentment of the 
hero of the book, and a felicitous name for him soon sug- 
gested itself. Only a single number of the serial had ap- 
peared when Mr. Seymour's own hand put an end to his 
life It is well known that among the applicants for the 
vacant office of illustrator of the Pickwick Pcqws was 



22 DICKEiVS. [chap. 

Thackeray — the senior of Dickens by a few months — 
whose style as a draughtsman would have been singularly 
unsuited to the adventures and the gaiters of Mr. Pick- 
wick. Finally, in no altogether propitious hour for some 
of Dickens's books, Mr. Hablot Browne ("Phiz") was 
chosen as illustrator. Some happy hits — such as the fig- 
ure of Mr. Micavvber — apart, the illustrations of Dickens 
by this artist, though often both imaginative and effective, 
are apt, on the one hand, to obscure the author's fidelity to 
nature, and on the other, to intensify his unreality. Oliver 
Twist, like the Sketohes, was illustrated by George Cruik- 
shank, a pencil humourist of no common calibre, but as a 
rule ugly with the whole virtuous intention of his heart. 
Dickens himself was never so well satisfied with any illus- 
trator as with George Cattermole (alias " Kittenraoles "), a 
connection of his by marriage, who co-operated with Hab- 
lot Browne in Master Humphrey 's Clock; in his latest 
works he resorted to the aid of younger artists, whose 
reputation has since justified his confidence. The most 
congenial of the pictorial interpreters of Dickens, in his 
brightest and freshest humour, was his valued friend John 
Leech, whose services, together occasionally with those of 
Doyle, Frank Stone, and Tenniel, as well as of his faithful 
Stanfield and Maclise, he secured for his Christmas books. 
The Pickwick Papers, of which the issue was completed 
by the end of 1837, brought in to Dickens a large sum of 
money, and after a time a handsome annual income. On 
the whole this has remained the most general favourite of 
all his books. Yet it is not for this reason only that 
Pickioick defies criticism, but also because the circum- 
stances under which the book was begun and carried on 
make it preposterous to judge it by canons applicable to 
its author's subsequent fictions. As the serial proceeded, 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. s.; 

the interest which was to be divided between the inserted 
tales, some of which have real merit, and the framework, 
was absorbed by the latter. The rise in the style of the 
book can almost be measured by the change in the treat- 
ment of its chief character, Mr. Pickwick himself. In a 
later preface, Dickens endeavoured to illustrate this change 
by the analogy of real life. The truth, of course, is that it 
was only as the author proceeded that he recognised the 
capabilities of the character, and his own power of making 
it, and his book with it, truly lovable as well as laughable. 
Thus, on the very same page in which Mr. Pickwick proves 
himself a true gentleman in his leave-taking from Mr. 
NuDkins, there follows a little bit of the idyl between 
Sum and the pretty housemaid, written with a delicacy 
that could hardly have been suspected in the chronicler of 
the experiences of Miss Jemima Evans or of Mr. Augustus 
Cooper. In the subsequent part of the main narrative 
will be found exemplified nearly all the varieties of pathos 
of which Dickens was afterwards so repeatedly to prove 
himself master, more especially, of course, in those prison 
scenes for which some of our older novelists may have 
furnished him with hints. Even that subtle species of 
humour is not wanting which is content to miss its effect 
with the less attentive reader; as in this passage concern- 
ing the ruined cobbler's confidences to Sam in the Fleet: 

" The cobbler paused to ascertain what effect his story had pro- 
duced on Sam ; but finding that he had dropped asleep, knocked the 
aslus out of his pipe, sighed, put it down, drew the bedclothes over 
his head, and went to sleep too." 

Goldsmith himself could not have put more of pathos and 
more of irony into a single word. 

But it may seem out of place to dwell upon details such 



24 DICKENS. [chap! 

as this in view of tlic broad and universally acknowledged 
comic effects of this masterpiece of English humour. Its 
many genuinely comic characters are as broadly marked 
as the heroes of the least refined of sporting novels, and as 
true to nature as the most elaborate products of Addison's 
art. The author's humour is certainly not one which 
eschews simple in favour of subtle means, or which is 
averse from occasional desipience in the form of the wild- 
est farce. Mrs. Leo Hunter's garden - party — or rather 
"public breakfast"— at The Den, Eatanswill ; Mr. Pick- 
wick's nocturnal descent, through three gooseberry-bushes 
and a rose-tree, upon the virgin soil of Miss Tomkins's es- 
tablishment for young ladies ; the supplice (fun homme of 
Mr. Pott; Mr. Wellcr junior's love-letter, with notes and 
comments by Mr. Weller senior, and Mr. Weller senior's 
own letter of affliction written by somebody else; the 
footmen's " swarry " at Bath, and Mr. Bob Sawyer's bach- 
elors' party in the Borough — all these and many other 
scenes and passages have in them that jovial element of 
exaggeration which nobody mistakes and nobody resents. 
Whose duty is it to check the volubility of Mr. Alfred 
Jingle, or to weigh the heaviness, quot litiras, of the Fat 
Boy? Every one is conscious of the fact that in the con- 
tagious high spirits of the author lies one of the chief 
charms of the book. Not, however, that the effect pro- 
duced is obtained without the assistance of a very vigilant 
art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character 
which is upon the whole the most brilliant of the many 
brilliant additions which the author made to his original 
group of personages. If there is nothing so humorous in 
the book as Sam Weller, neither is there in it anything 
more pathetic than the relation between him and his mas- 
ter. As for Sam Weller's style of speech, scant justice 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS 25 

was done to it by Mr. Pickwick when he observed to Job 
Trotter, " My man is in the right, although his mode of 
expressing his opinion is somewhat homely, and occasion- 
ally incomprehensible." The fashion of Sam's gnomic 
philosophy is at least as old as Theocritus; 1 but the spe- 
cial impress which he has given to it is his own, rudely 
foreshadowed, perhaps, in some of the apophthegms of his 
father. Incidental Sam Wellerisms in Oliver Twist and 
Nicholas Nickleby show how enduring a hold the whim- 
sical fancy had taken of its creator. For the rest, the 
freshness of the book continues the same to the end ; and 
farcical as are some of the closing scenes — those, for in- 
stance, in which a chorus of coachmen attends the move- 
ments of the elder Mr. Weller — there is even here no 
straining after effect. An exception might perhaps be 
found in the catastrophe of the Shepherd, which is coarse- 
ly contrived ; but the fun of the character is in itself nei- 
ther illegitimate nor unwholesome. It will be observed 
below that it is the constant harping on the same string, 
the repeated picturing of professional preachers of religion 
as gross and greasy scoundrels, which in the end becomes 
offensive in Dickens. 

On the whole, no hero has ever more appropriately bid- 
den farewell to his labours than Mr. Pickwick in the words 
which he uttered at the table of the ever-hospitable Mr. 
Wardle at the Adelphi. 

" ' I shall never regret,' said Mr. Pickwick, in a low voice — ' I shall 
never regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing 
with different varieties and shades of human character ; frivolous as 

1 See Idyll, xv. 11. This discovery is not my own, but that of the 
late Dr. Donaldson, who used to translate the passage accordingly 
with great gusto. 

9* C 



26 DICKENS. [chap. 

my pursuit of noTelty may appear to many. Nearly the whole of my 
previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of 
wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have 
dawned upon me — I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and to the 
improvement of my understanding. If I have done but little gooil, 
I trust I have done less harm, and that none of my adventures will 
be other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection to me in 
the decline of life. God bless you all.' " 



Of course Mr. Pickwick " filled and drained a bumper " 
to the sentiment. Indeed, it " snowetli " in this book " of 
meat and drink." Wine, ale, and brandy abound there, 
and viands to which ample justice is invariably done — 
even under Mr. Tupman's hear-trending circumstances at 
the (now, alas ! degenerate) Leather Bottle. Something 
of this is due to the times in which the work was com- 
posed, and to the class of readers for which we may sup- 
pose it in the first instance to have been intended ; but 
Dickens, though a temperate man, loved the paraphernalia 
of good cheer, besides cherishing the associations which 
are inseparable from it. At the same time, there is a lit- 
tle too much of it in the Pickwick Papers, however well 
its presence may consort with the geniality which per- 
vades them. It is difficult to turn any page of the book 
without chancing on one of those supremely felicitous 
phrases in the ready mintage of which Dickens at all 
times excelled. But its chief attraction lies in the spirit 
of the whole — that spirit of true humour which calls forth 
at once merriment, good-will, and charity. 

In the year 1836, which the commencement of the Pick- 
wick Papers has made memorable in the history of English 
literature, Dickens was already in the full tide of author- 
ship. In February, 1837, the second number of Bentley's 
Miscellany, a new monthly magazine which he had under- 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 27 

taken to edit, contained the opening chapters of his story 
of Oliver Twist. Shortly before this, in September and 
December, 1836, he had essayed two of the least ambitiuus 
branches of dramatic authorship. The acting of Ilarley, 
an admirable dry comedian, gave some vitality to The 
Strange Gentleman, a " comic burletta," or farce, in two 
acts, founded upon the tale in the Sketches called The 
Great Winglebury Duel. It ran for seventy nights at 
Drury Lane, and, in its author's opinion, was " the best 
thing Harley did." But the adaptation has no special feat- 
ure distinguishing it from the original, unless it be the ef- 
fective bustle of the opening. The Village Coquettes, an 
operetta represented at the St. James's Theatre, with mu- 
sic by Hullah, was an equally unpretending effort. In 
this piece Harley took one part, that of " a very small 
farmer with a very large circle of intimate friends," and 
John Parry made his debut on the London stage in an- 
other. To quote any of the songs in this operetta would 
be very unfair to Dickens. 1 He was not at all depressed 
by the unfavourable criticisms which were passed upon his 
libretto, and against which he had to set the round decla- 
ration of Braham, that there had been "no such music 
since the days of Shiel, and no such piece since The Du- 
enna." As time went on, however, he became anything 
but proud of his juvenile productions as a dramatist, and 
strongly objected to their revival. His third and last at- 
tempt of this kind, a farce called The Lamplighter, which 
he wrote for Covent Garden in 1838, was never acted, hav- 
ing been withdrawn by Macready's wish; and in 1841 
Dickens converted it into a story printed among the Pic- 

1 For operas, as a form of dramatic entertainment, Dickens seems 
afterwards to have entertained a strong contempt, such as, indeed, it 
is difficult for any man with a sense of humour wholly to avoid. 



28 DICKENS. [chap. 

nic Papers, a collection generously edited by him for the 
benefit of the widow and children of a publisher towards 
whom he had little cause for personal gratitude. His 
friendship for Macready kept alive in him for some time 
the desire to write a comedy worthy of so distinguished 
an actor ; and, according to his wont, he had even chosen 
beforehand for the piece a name which he was not to for- 
get — No Thoroughfare. But the genius of the age, an 
influence which is often stronger than personal wishes or 
inclinations, diverted him from dramatic composition. He 
would have been equally unwilling to see mentioned among 
his literary works the Life of Grimaldi, which he merely 
edited, and which must be numbered among forgotten me- 
morials of forgotten greatness. 

To the earlier part of 1838 belong one or two other 
publications, which their author never cared to reprint. 
The first of these, however, a short pamphlet entitled 
Sunday under Three Heads, is not without a certain bio- 
graphical interest. This little book was written with im- 
mediate reference to a bill "for the better observance of 
the Sabbath," which the House of Commons had recently 
thrown out by a small majority; and its special purpose 
was the advocacy of Sunday excursions, and harmless Sun- 
day amusements, in lieu of the alternate gloom and drunk- 
enness distinguishing what Dickens callo,d a London Sun- 
day as it is. His own love of fresh air and brightness in- 
tensified his hatred of a formalism which shuts its ears to 
argument. In the powerful picture of a Sunday evening 
in London, "gloomy, close, and stale," which he afterwards 
drew in Little Dorrit, he almost seems to hold Sabbatari- 
anism and the weather responsible for one another. When 
he afterwards saw a Parisian Sunday, he thought it " not 
comfortable," so that, like others who hate bigotry, he may 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS 29 

perhaps have come to recognise the difficulty of arrang- 
ing an English Sunday as it might be made. On the oth- 
er hand, he may have remembered his youthful fancy of 
the good clergyman encouraging a game of cricket- after 
church, when thirty years later, writing from Edinburgh, 
he playfully pictured the counterpart of Sunday as Sab- 
bath bills would have it: describing how "the usual prep- 
arations are making for the band in the open air in the 
afternoon, and the usual pretty children (selected for that 
purpose) are at this moment hanging garlands round the 
Scott monument preparatory to the innocent Sunday dance 
round that edifice with which the diversions invariably 
close." The Sketches of Young Gentlemen, published in 
the same year, are little if at all in advance of the earlier 
Sketches by JBoz, and were evidently written to order. He 
finished them in precisely a fortnight, and noted in his 
diary that " one hundred and twenty-five pounds for such 
a book, without any name to it, is pretty well." The 
Sketches of Young Couples, which followed as late as 
1840, have the advantage of a facetious introduction, sug- 
gested by her Majesty's own announcement of her ap- 
proaching marriage. But the life has long gone out of 
these pleasantries, as it has from others of the same cast, 
in which many a mirthful spirit, forced to coin its mirth 
into money, has ere now spent itself. 

It was the better fortune of Dickens to be able almost 
from the first to keep nearly all his writings on a level 
with his powers. He never made a bolder step forwards 
than when, in the very midst of the production of Pick- 
wick, he began his first long continuous story, the Advent' 
ures of Oliver Twist. Those who have looked at the 
M.S. <>f this famous novel will remember the vigour of the 
handwriting, and how few, in comparison with his later 



30 DICKENS. [chap. 

MSS., are the additions and obliterations which it exhibits. 
But here and there the writing shows traces of excite- 
ment ; for the author's heart was in his work, and much 
of it, contrary to his later habit, was written at night. 
No doubt he was upheld in the labour of authorship by 
something besides ambition and consciousness of strength. 
Oliver Ttvist was certainly written with a purpose, and 
with one that was afterwards avowed. The author in- 
tended to put before his readers — " so long as their speech 
did not offend the ear" — a picture of "dregs of life," 
hitherto, as he believed, never exhibited by any novelist 
in their loathsome reality. Yet the old masters of fic- 
tion, Fielding in particular, as well as the old master of 
the brush whom Dickens cites (Hogarth), had not shrunk 
from the path which their disciple now essayed. Dickens, 
however, was naturally thinking of his own generation, 
which had already relished Paul Clifford, and which was 
not to be debarred from exciting itself over Jack Shep- 
pard, begun before Oliver Twist had been completed, and 
in the self-same magazine. Dickens's purpose was an hon- 
est and a praiseworthy one. But the most powerful and 
at the same time the most lovable element in his genius 
suggested the silver lining to the cloud. To that unfail- 
ing power of sympathy which was the mainspring of both 
his most affecting and his most humorous touches, we owe 
the redeeming features in his company of criminals; not 
only the devotion and the heroism of Nancy, but the ir- 
resistible vivacity of the Artful Dodger, and the good-hu- 
mour of Charley Bates, which moved Talfourd to " plead 
as earnestly in mitigation of judgment" against him as 
ever he had done " at the bar for any client he most re- 
spected." Other parts of the story were less carefully 
tempered. Mr. Fang, the police - magistrate, appears to 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 31 

have been a rather hasty portrait of a living original ; and 
the whole picture of Bumble and Bumbledom was cer- 
tainly a caricature of the working of the new Poor-law, 
confounding the question of its merits and demerits with 
that of its occasional maladministration. On the other 
hand, a vein of truest pathos runs through the whole of 
poor Nancy's story, and adds to the effect of a marvel- 
lously powerful catastrophe. From Nancy's interview with 
Rose at London Bridge to the closing scenes — the flight of 
Sikes, his death at Jacob's Island, and the end of the Jew — 
the action has an intensity rare in the literature of the 
terrible. By the side of this genuine tragic force, which 
perhaps it would be easiest to parallel from some of the 
" low " domestic tragedy of the Elizabethans, the author's 
comic humour burst forth upon the world in a variety of 
entirely new types : Bumble and his partner ; Noah Clay- 
pole, complete in himself, but full of promise for Uriah 
Heep ; and the Jew, with all the pupils and supporters of 
his establishment of technical education. Undeniably the 
story of Oliver Twist also contains much that is artificial 
and stilted, with much that is weak and (the author of 
Endymion is to be thanked for the word) "gushy." Thus, 
all the Maylie scenes, down to the last in which Oliver dis- 
creetly " glides " away from the lovers, are barely endura- 
ble. But, whatever its shortcomings, Oliver Twist remains 
an almost unique example of a young author's brilliant 
success in an enterprise of complete novelty and extreme 
difficulty. Some of its situations continue to exercise their 
power even over readers already familiarly acquainted with 
them ; and some of its characters will live by the side of 
Dickens's happiest and most finished creations. Even had 
a sapient critic been right who declared, during the prog- 
ress of the story, that Mr. Dickens appeared to have worked 



32 DICKENS. [char 

out " the particular vein of humour which had hitherto 
yielded so much attractive metal," it would have been 
worked out to some purpose. After making his readers 
merry with Pickwick, he had thrilled them with Oliver 
Twist; and by the one book as by the other he had made 
them think better of mankind. 

But neither had his vein been worked out, nor was his 
hand content with a single task. In April, 1838, several 
months before the completion of Oliver Twist, the first 
number of Nicholas Nickleby appeared ; and while en- 
gaged upon the composition of these books he contributed 
to Bentlei/s Miscellany, of which he retained the editor- 
ship till the early part of 1839, several smaller articles. 
Of these, the Mudfog Papers have been recently thought 
worth reprinting; but even supposing the satire against 
the Association for the Advancement of Everything to 
have not yet altogether lost its savour, the fun of the day 
before yesterday refuses to be revived. Nicholas Nickle- 
l)//, published in twenty numbers, was the labour of many 
months, but was produced under so great a press of work 
that during the whole time of publication Dickens was 
never a single number in advance. Yet, though not one 
of the most perfect of his books, it is indisputably one of 
the most thoroughly original, and signally illustrates the 
absurdity of recent attempts to draw a distinction between 
the imaginative romance of the past and the realistic novel 
of the present. Dickens was never so strong as when he 
produced from the real ; and in this instance — starting, 
no doubt, with a healthy prejudice — so carefully had he 
inspected the neighbourhood of the Yorkshire schools, of 
which Dotheboys Hall was to be held up as the infamous 
type, that there seems to be no difficulty in identifying 
the site of the very school itself; while the Portsmouth 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 33 

Theatre is to the full as accurate a study as the Yorkshire 
school. So, again, as every one knows, the Brothers Chee- 
ryble were real personages well known in Manchester, 1 
where even the original of Tim Linkinwater still survives 
in local remembrance. On the other hand, with how con- 
scious a strength has the author's imaginative power used 
and transmuted his materials : in the Sqneers family creat- 
ing a group of inimitable grotesqueness ; in their humblest 
victim Smike giving one of his earliest pictures of those 
outcasts whom he drew again and again with such infinite 
tenderness; and in Mr. Vincent Crummies and his com- 
pany, including the Phenomenon, establishing a jest, but 
a kindly one, for all times ! In a third series of episodes 
in this book, it is universally agreed that the author has 
no less conspicuously failed. Dickens's first attempt to 
picture the manners and customs of the aristocracy cer- 
tainly resulted in portraying some very peculiar people. 
Lord Frederick Verisopht, indeed — who is allowed to re- 
deem his character in the end — is not without touches 
resembling nature. 

" ' I take an interest, my lord,' said Mrs. Wititterly, with a faint 
smile, ' such an interest in the drama.' 

" ' Ye-es. It's very interasting,' replied Lord Frederick. 

" ' I'm always ill after Shakspeare,' said Mrs. Wititterly. ' I 
scarcely exist the next day. I find the reaction so veiy great after 
a tragedy, my lord, and Shakspeare is such a delicious creature.' 

" ' Ye-es,' replied Lord Frederick. ' He was a clayver man.' " 

But Sir Mulberry Hawk is a kind of scoundrel not fre- 
quently met with in polite society; his henchmen Pluck 
and Pyke have the air of " followers of Don John," and 

1 W. & D. Grant Brothers had their warehouse at the lower end of 
Cannon Street, and their private house in Mosely Street. 



34 DICKENS. [chap. 

the enjoyments of the " trainers of young noblemen and 
gentlemen " at Hampton races, together with the riotous 
debauch which precedes the catastrophe, seem taken direct 
from the transpontine, stage. The fact is that Dickens 
was here content to draw his vile seducers and wicked 
orgies just as commonplace writers had drawn them a 
thousand times before, and will draw them a thousand 
times again. Much of the hero's talk is of the same con- 
ventional kind. On the other hand, nothing could be 
more genuine than the flow of fun in this book, which 
finds its outlet in the most unexpected channels, but no- 
where so resistlessly as in the invertebrate talk of Mrs. 
Nickleby. For her Forster discovered a literary proto- 
type in a character of Miss Austen's; but even if Mrs. 
Nickleby was founded on Miss Bates, in Emma, she left 
her original far behind. Miss Bates, indeed, is verbose, 
roundabout, and parenthetic ; but the widow never devi- 
ates into coherence. 

Nicholas Nickleby shows the comic genius of its author 
in full activity, and should be read with something of the 
buoyancy of spirit in which it was written, and not with 
a callousness capable of seeing in so amusing a scamp as 
Mr. Mantalini one of Dickens's " monstrous failures." At 
the same time this book displays the desire of the author 
to mould his manner on the old models. The very title 
has a savour of Smollett about it ; the style has more than 
one reminiscence of him, as well as of Fielding and of Gold- 
smith ; and the general method of the narrative resembles 
that of our old novelists and their Spanish and French 
predecessors. Partly for this reason, and partly, no doubt, 
because of the rapidity with which the story was written, 
its construction is weaker than is usual even with Dick- 
ens's earlier works. Coincidences are repeatedly employed 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 35 

to help on the action ; and the denoument, which, besides 
turning Mr. Squeers into a thief, reveals Ralph Nickleby 
as the father of Smike, is oppressively complete. As to 
the practical aim of the novel, the author's word must be 
taken for the fact that " Mr. Squeers and his school were 
faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely 
subdued and kept down lest they should be deemed im- 
possible." The exposure, no doubt, did good in its way, 
though perhaps Mr. Squeers, in a more or less modified 
form, has proved a tougher adversary to overcome than 
Mrs. Gamp. 

During these years Dickens was chiefly resident in the 
modest locality of Doughty Street, whither he had moved 
his household from the "three rooms," "three storeys 
high," in Furnival's Inn, early in 1837. It was not till 
the end of 1839 that he took up his abode, further west, 
in a house which he came to like best among all his Lon- 
don habitations, in Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park. 
His town life, was, however, varied by long rustications at 
Twickenham and at Petersham, and by sojourns at the sea- 
side, of which he was a most consistent votary. He is 
found in various years of his life at Brighton, Dover, and 
Bonchurch — where he liked his neighbours better than 
he liked the climate ; and in later years, when he had 
grown accustomed to the Continent, he repeatedly do- 
mesticated himself at Boulogne. But already in 1837 
lie had discovered the little sea-side village, as it then was, 
which for many years afterwards became his favourite 
holiday retreat, and of which he would be the genius loci, 
even if he had not by a special description immortalised 
Our English Watering-place. Broadstairs — whose after- 
noon tranquillity even to this day is undisturbed except 
by the Ethiopians on their tramp from Margate to Rarns- 



36 DICKENS. [chap. 

gate — and its constant visitor, are thus described in a let- 
ter written to an American friend in 1843: "This is a 
little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff, where- 
on — in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay — our house 
stands ; the sea rolling and dashing under the windows. 
Seven miles out are the Goodwin Sands (you've heard of 
the Goodwin Sands?), whence floating lights perpetually 
wink after dark, as if they were carrying on intrigues 
with the servants. Also there is a big light-house called 
the North Foreland on a hill beyond the village, a severe 
parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy float- 
ers, and stares grimly out upon the sea. Under the cliff 
are rare good sands, where all the children assemble every 
morning and throw up impossible fortifications, which the 
sea throws down again at high-water. Old gentlemen and 
ancient ladies flirt after their own manner in two reading- 
rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open air. 
Other old gentlemen look all day through telescopes and 
never see anything. In a bay-window in a one-pair sits, 
from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long- 
hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he 
thought he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz." 

Not a few houses at Broadstairs may boast of having 
been at one time or another inhabited by him and his. 
Of the long- desired Fort House, however, which local 
pervcrsencss triumphantly points out as the original of 
Bleak House (no part even of Bleak House was written 
there, though part of David Copper field was), he could not 
obtain possession till 1850. As like Bleak House as it is 
like Chesney Wold, it stands at the very highest end of 
the place, looking straight out to sea, over the little har- 
bour and its two colliers, with a pleasant stretch of corn- 
fields leading along the cliff towards the light-house which 



n.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 37 

Dickens promised Lord Carlisle should serve him as a 
night-light. But in 1837 Dickens was content with nar- 
rower quarters. The "long small procession of sons" and 
daughters had as yet only begun with the birth of his el- 
dest boy. His life was simple and full of work, and occa- 
sional sea-side or country quarters, and now and then a 
brief holiday tour, afforded the necessary refreshment of 
change. In 1S37 he made his first short trip abroad, and 
in the following year, accompanied by Mr. Hablot Browne, 
he spent a week of enjoyment in Warwickshire, noting 
in his Remembrancer : " Stratford ; Shakspeare ; the birth- 
place ; visitors, scribblers, old woman (query whether she 
knows what Shakspeare did), etc." Meanwhile, among 
his truest home enjoyments were his friendships. They 
were few in .number, mostly with men for whom, after he 
had once taken them into his heart, he preserved a life-long 
regard. Chief of all these were John Forster and Daniel 
Maclise, the high-minded painter, to whom we owe a charm- 
ing portrait of his friend in this youthful period of his 
life. Losing them, he afterwards wrote when absent from 
England, was " like losing my arms and legs, and dull and 
tame I am without you." Besides these, he was at this 
time on very friendly terms with William Harrison Ains- 
worth, who succeeded him in the editorship of the Miscel- 
lany, and concerning whom he exclaimed in his Remem- 
brancer : " Ainsworth has a fine heart." At the close of 
1838, Dickens, Ainsworth, and Forster constituted them- 
selves a club called the Trio, and afterwards the Cerberus. 
Another name frequent in the Remembrancer entries is 
that of Talfourd, a generous friend, in whom, as Dickens 
finely said after his death, " the success of other men made 
as little change as his own." All these, together with 
Stanfield, the Landseers, Douglas Jerrold, Macready, and 




38 DICKENS. [chap. 

others less known to fame, were among the friends and as- 
sociates of Dickens's prime. The letters, too, remaining 
from this part of Dickens's life, have all the same tone of 
unaffected frankness. With some of his intimate friends 
he had his established epistolary jokes. Stanfield, the great 
marine painter, he pertinaciously treated as a " very salt" 
correspondent, communications to whom, as to a " block- 
roeving, main -brace -splicing, lead -heaving, ship -conning, 
stun'sail-bending, deck-swabbing son of a sea-cook," needed 
garnishing with the obscurest technicalities and strangest 
oaths of his element. (It is touching to turn from these 
friendly buffooneries to a letter written by Dickens many 
years afterward — in 1867 — and mentioning a visit to " poor 
dear Stanfield," when " it was clear that the shadow of the 
end had fallen on him. ... It happened well that I had 
seen, on a wild day at Tynemouth, a remarkable sea effect, 
of which I wrote a description to him, and he had kept it 
under his pillow.") Macready, after his retirement from 
the stage, is bantered on the score of his juvenility with a 
pertinacity of fun recalling similar whimsicalities of Charles 
Lamb's ; or the jest is changed, and the great London actor 
in his rural retreat is depicted in the character of a coun- 
try gentleman strange to the wicked ways of the town. 
As in the case of many delightful letter-writers, the charm 
of Dickens as a correspondent vanishes so soon as he be- 
comes self-conscious. Even in his letters to Lady Bless- 
ington and Mrs. Watson, a striving after effect is at times 
perceptible ; the homage rendered to Lord John Russell is 
not offered with a light hand ; on the contrary, when writ- 
ing to Douglas Jerrold, Dickens is occasionally so intent 
upon proving himself a sound Radical that his vehemence 
all but passes into a shriek. 
flu these early years, at all events, Dickens was happy in 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 39 

/the society of Lis chosen friends. His favourite amuse- 
\J ments were a country walk or ride with Forster, or a din- 

\ner at Jack Straw's Castle with him and Maclise. He was 
likewise happy at home. Here, however, in the very in- 
nermost circle of his affections, he had to suffer the first 
threat personal grief of his life. His younger sister-in-law, 
Miss Mary Hogarth, had accompanied him and his wife 
into their new abode in Doughty Street, and here, in May, 
1837, she died, at the early age of seventeen. No sorrow 
seems ever to have touched the heart and possessed the 
imagination of Charles Dickens like that for the loss of 
this dearly-loved girl, " young, beautiful, and good." " I 
can solemnly say," he wrote to her mother a few months 
after her death, " that, waking or sleeping, I have never 
lost the recollection of our hard trial and sorrow, and I 
feel that I never shall." " If," ran part of his first entry 
in the Diary which he began on the first day of the fol- 
lowing year, "she were with us now, the same winning, 
happy, amiable companion, sympathising with all my 
thoughts and feelings more than any one I knew ever did 
or will, I think I should have nothing to wish for but a 
continuance of such happiness. But she is gone, and pray 
God I may one day, through his mercy, rejoin her." It 
was not till, in after years, it became necessary to abandon 
the project, that he ceased to cherish the intention of be- 
ing buried by her side, and through life the memory of 
her haunted him with strange vividness. At the Niagara 
Falls, when the spectacle of Nature in her glory had pro- 
duced in him, as he describes it, a wondrously tranquil and 
happy peace of mind, he longed for the presence of his 
dearest friends^ and " I was going to add, what would I 
give if the dear girl, whose ashes lie in Kensal Green, had 
lived to come so far along with us ; but she has been here 



40 DICKENS. [chap. 

many times, I doubt not, since her sweet face faded from 
my earthly sight." "After she died," he wrote to her 
mother in May, 1843, "I dreamed of her every night for 
many weeks, and always with a kind of quiet happiness, 
which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down at 
night without a hope of the vision coming back in one 
shape or other. And so it did." Once he dreamt of her, 
when travelling in Yorkshire ; and then, after an interval 
of many months, as he lay asleep one night at Genoa, it 
seemed to him as if her spirit visited him and spoke to 
him in words which he afterwards precisely remembered, 
when he had awaked, with the tears running down his 
face. He never forgot her, and in the year before he died 
he wrote to his friend : " She is so much in my thoughts 
at all times, especially when I am successful and have 
greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her 
is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from 
my existence as the beating of my heart is !" In a word, 
she was the object of the one great imaginative passion of 
his life. Many have denied that there is any likeness to 
nature in the fictitious figure in which, according to the 
wont of imaginative workers, he was irresistibly impelled 
to embody the sentiment with which she inspired him ; but 
the sentiment itself became part of his nature, and part 
of his history. When in writing the Old Curiosity Shop 
he approached the death of Little Nell, he shrunk from 
the task : " Dear Mary died yesterday, when I think of 
this sad story." 

The Old Curiosity Shop has long been freed from the 
encumbrances which originally surrounded it, and there 
is little except biographical interest in the half-forgotten 
history of Master Humphrey's Clock. Early in the year 
1840, his success and confidence in his powers induced 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 41 

him to undertake an illustrated weekly journal, in which 
he depended solely on his own name, and, in the first 
instance, on his own efforts, as a writer. Such was his 
trust in his versatility that he did not think it necessary 
even to open with a continuous story. Perhaps the popu- 
larity of the Pickwick Papers encouraged him to adopt 
the time-honoured device of wrapping up several tales in 
one. In any case, his framework was in the present in- 
stance too elaborate to take hold of the public mind, while 
the characters introduced into it possessed little or noth- 
ing of the freshness of their models in the Toiler and the 
Spectator. In order to re-enforce Master Humphrey, the 
deaf gentleman, and the other original members of his 
benevolent conclave, he hereupon resorted to a natural, but 
none the less unhappy, expedient. Mr. Pickwick was re- 
vived, together with Sam Weller and his parent ; and a 
Weller of the third generation was brought on the stage 
in the person of a precocious four-year-old, " standing 
with his little legs very wide apart as if the top-boots 
were familiar to them, and actually winking upon the 
house-keeper with his infant eye, in imitation of his grand- 
father." A laugh may have been raised at the time by 
this attempt, from which, however, every true Pickwickian 
must have turned sadly away. Nor was there much in 
the other contents of these early numbers to make up 
for the disappointment. As, therefore, neither " Master 
Humphrey's Clock " nor " Mr. Weller's Watch " seemed 
to promise any lasting success, it was prudently deter- 
mined that the story of the Old Curiosity Shop, of 
which the first portion had appeared in the fourth num- 
ber of the periodical, should run on continuously ; and 
when this had been finished, a very short " link " suf- 
ficed to introduce another story, Barnaby Rudye, with 
3 D 



42 DICKENS. [chap. 

the close of which Master Humphrey 's Clock likewise 
stopped. 

In the Old Curiosity Shop, though it abounds in both 
grotesquely terrible and boisterously laughable effects, the 
key-note is that of an idyllic pathos. The sense of this 
takes hold of the reader at the very outset, as he lingers 
over the picture, with which the first chapter concludes, 
of little Nell asleep through the solitary night in the cu- 
riosity-dealer's warehouse. It retains possession of him as 
he accompanies the innocent heroine through her wander- 
ings, pausing with her in the church-yard where ail is 
quiet save the cawing of the satirical rooks, or in the 
school - master's cottage by the open window, through 
which is borne upon the evening air the distant hum of 
the boys at play upon the green, while the poor school- 
master holds in his hand the small cold one of the little 
scholar that has fallen asleep. Nor is it absent to the 
last when Nell herself lies at rest in her little bed. " Her 
little bird — a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger 
would have crushed — was stirring nimbly in its cage ; and 
the strong heart of its child-mistress was mute and mo- 
tionless forever." The hand which drew Little Nell 
afterwards formed other figures not less affecting, but 
none so essentially poetic. Like many such characters, 
this requires, for its full appreciation, a certain tension of 
the mind; and those who will not, or cannot, pass in 
some measure out of themselves, will be likely to tire of 
the conception, or to declare its execution artificial. Cu- 
riously enough, not only was Little Nell a favourite of 
Landor, a poet and critic utterly averse from meretricious 
art, but she also deeply moved the sympathy of Lord Jef- 
frey, vvho at least knew his own mind, and spoke it in 
both praise and blame. As already stated, Dickens only 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 43 

with difficulty brought himself to carry his story to its 
actual issue, though it is hard to believe that he could 
ever have intended a different close from that which he 
gave to it. His whole heart was in the story, nor could 
he have consoled himself by means of an ordinary happy 
ending. 

Dickens's comic humour never flowed in a pleasanter 
vein than in the Old Curiosity Shop, and nowhere has it 
a more exquisite element of pathos in it. The shock- 
headed, red-cheeked Kit is one of the earliest of those un- 
gainly figures who speedily find their way. into our affec- 
tions — the odd family to which Mr. Toots, Tom Pinch, 
Tommy T raddles, and Joe Gargery alike belong. But 
the triumph of this serio-comic form of art in the Old 
Curiosity Shop is to be found in the later experiences of 
Dick Swivel ler, who seems at first merely a more engag- 
ing sample of the Bob Sawyer species, but who ends by 
endearing himself to the most thoughtless laugher. Dick 
Swiveller and his protegee have gained a lasting place 
among the favourite characters of English fiction, and the 
privations of the Marchioness have possibly had a result 
which would have been that most coveted by Dickens — 
that of helping towards the better treatment of a class 
whose lot is among the dust and ashes, too often very 
bitter ashes, of many households. Besides these, the 
story contains a variety of incidental characters of a class 
which Dickens never grew weary of drawing from the 
life. Messrs. Codlin, Short, and Company, and the rest 
of the itinerant showmen, seem to have come straight 
from the most real of country fairs ; and if ever a troupe 
of comedians deserved pity on their wanderings through a 
callous world, it was the most diverting and the most dis- 
mal of all the mountebanks that gathered round the stew 



44 DICKENS. [chap. 

of tripe in the kitchen of The Jolly Sandboys — Jerry's 
performing dogs. 

" ' Your people don't usually travel in character, do they ?' said 
Short, pointing to the dresses of the dogs. ' It must come expensive 
if they do.' 

" ' No,' replied Jerry — ' no, it's not the custom with us. But we've 
been playing a little on the road to-day, and we corne out with a new 
wardrobe at the races, so I didn't think it worth while to stop to un- 
dress. Down, Pedro !' " 

In addition to these public servants we have a purveyor 
of diversion — or instruction — of an altogether different 
stamp. "Does the caravan look as if it know'd em?" 
indignantly demands the proprietress of Jarley's wax-work, 
when asked whether she is acquainted with the men of 
the Punch show. She too is drawn, or moulded, in the 
author's most exuberant style of fun, together with her 
company, in which "all the gentlemen were very pigeon- 
breasted and very blue about the beards, and all the ladies 
were miraculous figures ; and all the ladies and all the 
gentlemen were looking intensely nowhere, and staring 
with extraordinary earnestness at nothing." 

In contrast with these genial products of observation 
and humour stand the grotesquely hideous personages 
who play important parts in the machinery of the story, 
the vicious dwarf Quilp and the monstrous virago Sally 
Brass. The former is among the most successful attempts 
of Dickens in a direction which was full of danger for 
him, as it is for all writers; the malevolent little demon is 
so blended with his surroundings — the description of 
which forms one of the author's most telling pictures of 
the lonely foulnesses of the river-side — that his life seems 
natural in its way, and his death a most appropriate end- 
ing to it. Sally Brass, "whose accomplishments were all 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 45 

of a masculine and strictly legal kind," is less of a carica- 
ture, and not without a humorously redeeming point of 
feminine weakness ; yet the end of her and her brother is 
described at the close of the book with almost tragic ear- 
nestness. On the whole, though the poetic sympathy of 
Dickens when he wrote this book was absorbed in the 
character of his heroine, yet his genius rarely asserted it- 
self after a more diversified fashion. 

Of Barnaby Rudge, though in my opinion an excellent 
book after its kind, I may speak more briefly. With the 
exception of A Tale of Tivo Cities, it was Dickens's only 
attempt in the historical novel. In the earlier work the 
relation between the foreground and background of the 
story is skilfully contrived, and the colouring of the whole, 
without any elaborate attempt at accurate fidelity, has a 
generally true and harmonious effect. With the help of 
her portrait by a painter (Mr. Frith) for whose pictures 
Dickens had a great liking, Dolly Varden has justly taken 
hold of the popular fancy as a charming type of a pretty 
girl of a century ago. And some of the local descriptions 
in the early part of the book are hardly less pleasing : the 
Temple in summer, as it was before the charm of Fountain 
Court was destroyed by its guardians ; and the picturesque 
comforts of the Maypole Inn, described beforehand, by way 
of contrast to the desecration of its central sanctuary. The 
intrigue of the story is fairly interesting in itself, and the 
gentlemanly villain who plays a principal part in it, though, 
as usual, over -elaborated, is drawn with more skill than 
Dickens usually displays in such characters. After the 
main interest of the book has passed to the historical ac- 
tion of the George Gordon riots, the story still retains its 
coherence, and, a few minor improbabilities apart, is suc- 
cessfully conducted to its close. No historical novel can 



46 DICKENS. [chap. 

altogether avoid the banalities of the species ; and though 
Dickens, like all the world, had his laugh at the late ^lr. 
G. P. R. James, he is constrained to introduce the histori- 
cal hero of the tale, with his confidential adviser, and his 
attendant, in the familiar guise of three horsemen. As for 
Lord George Gordon himself, and the riots of which the 
responsibility remains inseparable from his unhappy mem- 
ory, the representation of them in the novel sufficiently ac- 
cords both with poetic probability and with historical fact. 
The poor lord's evil genius, indeed, Gashford — who has no 
historical original — tries the reader's sense of verisimilitude 
rather hard; such converts are uncommon except among 
approvers. The Protestant hangman, on the other hand, 
has some slight historical warranty ; but the leading part 
which he is made to play in the riots, and his resolution to 
go any lengths " in support of the great Protestant princi- 
ple of hanging," overshoot the mark. It cannot be said 
that there is any substantial exaggeration in the descrip- 
tion of the riots; thus, the burning of the great distiller's 
house in Ilolborn is a well-authenticated fact; and there 
is abundant vigour in the narrative. Repetition is un- 
avoidable in treating such a theme, but in Barnaby Kudge 
it is not rendered less endurable by mannerism, nor puffed 
out with rhetoric. 

One very famous character in this story was, as person- 
ages in historical novels often are, made up out of two 
originals. 1 This was Grip the Raven, who, after seeing 

1 As there ia hardly a character in the whole world of fiction and 
the drama without some sort of a literary predecessor, so Dickens 
may have derived the first notion of Grip from the raven Ralpho — 
likewise the property of an idiot — who frightened Roderick Random 
and Strap out of their wits, and into the belief that he was the per- 
sonage Grip so persistently declared himself to be. 



ii.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 47 

the idiot hero of the tale safe through his adventures, re- 
sumed his addresses on the suhject of the kettle to the 
horses in the stable ; and who, " as he was a mere infant 
when Barnaby was gray, has very probably gone on talk- 
ing to the present time." In a later preface to Barnaby 
Rudge, Dickens, with infinite humour, related his experi- 
ences of the two originals in question, and how he had 
been ravenless since the mournful death before the kitchen 
fire of the second of the pair, the Grip of actual life. This 
occurred in the house at Devonshire Terrace, into which 
the family had moved two years before (in 1839). 

As Dickens's fame advanced his circle of acquaintances 
was necessarily widened; and in 1841 he was invited to 
visit Edinburgh, and to receive there the first great tribute 
of public recognition which had been paid to him. He 
was entertained with great enthusiasm at a public banquet, 
voted the freedom of the city, and so overwhelmed with 
hospitalities that, notwithstanding his frank pleasure in 
these honours, he was glad to make his escape at last, and 
refreshed himself with a tour in the Highlands. These 
excitements may have intensified in him a desire which 
had for some time been active in his mind, and which in 
any case would have been kept alive by an incessant series 
of invitations. He had signed an agreement with his pub- 
lishers for a new book before this desire took the shape of 
an actual resolution. There is no great difficulty in under- 
standing why Dickens made up his mind to go to Ameri- 
ca, and thus to interrupt, for the moment a course of life 
and work which was fast leading him on to great heights 
of fame and fortune. The question of international copy- 
right alone would hardly have induced him to cross the 
seas. Probably he felt instinctively that to see men and 
cities was part of the training as well as of the recreation 



48 DICKENS. [chap. ii. 

which his genius required. Dickens was by nature one 
of those artists who when at work always long to be in 
sympathy with their public, and to know it to be in sym- 
pathy with them. And hitherto he had not met more 
than part of his public of readers face to face. 



CHAPTER III. 

STRANGE LANDS. 

[1842-1847.] 

A journey across the Atlantic in midwinter is no child's- 
play even at the present day, when, bad though their 
passage may have been, few people would venture to 
confess doubts, as Dickens did, concerning the safety of 
such a voyage by steam in heavy weather. The travellers 
— for Dickens was accompanied by his wife — had an ex- 
ceptionally rough crossing, the horrors of which he has 
described in his American Notes. His powers of observa- 
tion were alive in the midst of the lethargy of sea-sick- 
ness, and when he could not watch others he found 
enough amusement in watching himself. At last, on 
January 28, 1842, they found themselves in Boston 
harbour. Their stay in the United States lasted about 
four months, during which time they saw Boston, New 
York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, 
Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Buffalo. Then they 
passed by Niagara into Canada, and after a pleasant visit 
to Montreal, diversified by private theatricals with the offi- 
cers there, were safe at home again in July. 

Dickens had met with an enthusiastic welcome in every 
part of the States where he had not gone out of the way 
3* 



50 DICKENS. ' [chap. 

of it; in New York, in particular, he had been feted, 
with a fervour unique even in the history of American 
enthusiasms, under the resounding title of " the Guest of 
the Nation." Still, even this imposed no moral obligation 
upon him to take the advice tendered to him in America, 
and to avoid writing about that country — " we are so very 
suspicious." On the other hand, whatever might be his 
indignation at the obstinate unwillingness of the American 
public to be moved a hair's- breadth by his championship 
of the cause of international copyright,' this failure could 
not, in a mind so reasonable as his, have outweighed the 
remembrance of the kindness shown to him and to his 
fame. But the truth seems to be that he had, if not at 
first, at least very speedily, taken a dislike to American 
ways which proved too strong for him to the last. In 
strange lands, most of all in a country which, like the 
United States, is not in the least ashamed to be what it is, 
travellers are necessarily at the outset struck by details ; 
and Dickens's habit of minute observation was certain 
not to let him lose many of them. He was neither long 
enough in the country to study very closely, nor was it 
in his way to ponder very deeply, the problems involved 
in the existence of many of the institutions with which 
he found fault. Thus, he was indignant at the sight of 
slavery, and even ventured to "tell a piece of his mind" 
on the subject to a judge in the South ; but when, twenty 
years later, the great struggle came, at the root of which 
this question lay, his sympathies were with the cause of 
disunion and slavery in its conflict with the " mad and 

1 After dining at a party including the son of an eminent man of 
letters, he notes in his Remembrancer that he found the great man's 
son "decidedly lumpish," and appends the reflexion, "Copyrights 
need be hereditary, for genius isn't." 



in.] STRANGE LANDS. 81 

villanous" North. In short, liis knowledge of America 
and its affairs was gained in such a way and under such 
circumstances as to entitle Rim, if he chose, to speak to 
the vast public which he commanded as an author of men 
and manners as observed by him ; but he had no right to 
judge the destinies and denounce the character of a great 
people on evidence gathered in the course of a holiday 
tour. 

Nor, indeed, did the American Notes, published by him 
after his return home, furnish any serious cause of offence. 
In an introductory chapter, which was judiciously sup- 
pressed, he had taken credit for the book as not having 
" a grain of any political ingredient in its whole composi- 
tion." Indeed, the contents were rather disappointing 
from their meagreness. The author showed good taste 
in eschewing all reference to his personal reception, and 
good judgment in leaving the copyright question undis- 
cussed. But though his descriptions were as vivid as 
usual — whether of the small steamboat, " of about half a 
pony power," on the Connecticut river, or of the dismal 
scenery on the Mississippi, "great father of rivers, who 
([•raise be to Heaven) has no young children like him !" — 
and though some of the figure-sketches were touched off 
with the happiest of hands, yet the public, even in 1842, 
was desirous to learn something more about America than 
tliis; It is true that Dickens had, with his usual conscien- 
tiousness, examined and described various interesting pub- 
lic institutions in the States — prisons, asylums, and the 
like ; but the book was not a very full one ; it was hardly 
anything but a sketch-book, with more humour, but with 
infinitely less poetic spirit, than the Sketch-book of the 
illustrious American author whose friendship had been 
one of the chief personal gains of Dickens's journey. 



52 DICKENS. [chap. 

The American Notes, for which the letters to Forster 
had furnished ample materials, were published in the year 
of Dickens's return, after he had refreshed himself with a 
merry Cornish trip in the company of his old friend, and 
his two other intimates, " Stanny " and " Mac." But he 
had not come home, as he had not gone out, to be idle. 
On the first day of the following year, 1843, appeared the 
first number of the story which was to furnish the real 
casus discriminis between Dickens and the enemies, as 
well no doubt as a very large proportion of the friends, 
whom he had left behind him across the water. The 
American scenes in Martin Chuzzlewit did not, it is true, 
begin till the fifth number of the story ; nor is it probable 
from the accounts of the sale, which was much smaller 
than Dickens had expected, that these particular episodes 
at first produced any strong feeling in the English public. 
But the merits of the book gradually obtained for it a 
popularity at home which has been surpassed by that of 
but one or two other of Dickens's works ; and in propor- 
tion to this popularity was the effect exercised by its 
American chapters. What that effect has been, it would 
be hypocrisy to question. 

Dickens, it is very clear, had been unable to resist the 
temptation of at once drawing upon the vast addition to 
his literary capital as a humourist. That the satire of 
many of the American scenes in Martin Chuzzlewit is, as 
satire, not less true than telling, it needs but a small ac- 
quaintance with American journalism and oratory even at 
the present day to perceive ; and the heartrending history 
of Eden, as a type of some of the settlements "vaunted 
in England as a mine of Golden Hope," at least had the 
warrant of something more than hearsay and a look in 
passing. Nor, as has already been observed, would it have 



in.] STRANGE LANDS. 53 

been in accordance either with human nature, or with the 
fitness of things, had Dickens allowed his welcome in 
America to become, to him (as he termed it in the sup- 
pressed Preface to the Notes) " an iron muzzle disguised 
beneath a flower or two." But the frankness, to say the 
least, of the mirror into which he now invited his late 
hosts to gaze was not likely to produce grateful compli- 
ments to its presenter, nor was the effect softened by the 
despatch with which this souvenir of the "guest of the 
nation " was pressed upon its attention. No doubt it 
would have been easy to reflect that onty the evil, not the 
good, sides of social life in America were held up to deri- 
sion and contempt, and that an honourable American jour- 
nalist had no more reason to resent the portraiture of Mr. 
Jefferson Brick than a virtuous English paterfamilias had 
to quarrel with that of Mr. Pecksniff. Unfortunately, of- 
fence is usually taken where offence is meant ; and there 
can be little doubt as to the animus with which Dickens 
had written. Only two months after landing at Boston 
Dickens had declared to Macready, that "however much 
he liked the ingredients of this great dish, he could not 
but say that the dish itself went against the grain with 
him, and that he didn't like it." It was not, and could 
not be, pleasant for Americans to find the "New York Sew- 
er, in its twelfth thousand, with a whole column of New 
Yorkers to be shown up, and all their names printed," in- 
troduced as the first expression of " the bubbling passions 
of their country ;" or to be certified, apropos of a conver- 
sation among American " gentlemen " after dinner, that 
dollars, and dollars only, at the risk of honesty and hon- 
our, filled their souls. " No satirist," Martin Chuzzlewit 
is told by a candid and open-minded American, " could, I 
believe, breathe this air." But satire in such passages as 



54 DICKENS. [cuav. 

these borders too closely on angry invective ; and neither 
the irresistible force nor the earnest pathos of the details 
which follow can clear away the suspicion that at the bot- 
tom lay a desire to depreciate. Nor was the general effect 
of the American episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit materially 
modified by their conclusion, to which, with the best of 
intentions, the author could not bring himself to give a 
genuinely complimentary turn. .The Americans did not 
like all this, and could not be expected to like it. The 
tone of the whole satire was too savage, and its tenor was 
too hopelessly one-sided, for it to pass unresented ; while 
much in it was too near the truth to glance off harmless. 
It is well known that in time Dickens came himself to un- 
derstand this. Before quitting America, in 1868, he de- 
clared his intention to publish in every future edition of 
his American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit his testimony 
to the magnanimous cordiality of his second reception in 
the States, and to the amazing changes for the better 
which he had seen everywhere around him during his 
second sojourn in the country. But it is not likely that 
the postscript, all the more since it was added under cir- 
cumstances so honourable to both sides, has undone, or 
will undo, the effect of the text. Very possibly the Amer- 
icans may, in the eyes of the English people as well as in 
their own, cease to be chargeable with the faults and foi- 
bles satirised by Dickens ; but the satire itself will live, 
and will continue to excite laughter and loathing, together 
with the other satire of the powerful book to which it 
belongs. 

For in none of his books is that power, which at times 
filled their author himself with astonishment, more strik- 
ingly and abundantly revealed than in The Life and Ad- 
ventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Never was his inventive 



in.] STRANGE LANDS. 55 

force more flexible and more at his command ; yet none 
of his books cost him more hard work. The very names of 
hero and novel were only the final fortunate choice out of 
a legion of notions ; though " Pecksniff " as well as " Char- 
ity " and " Mercy " ("not unholy names, I hope," said Mr. 
Pecksniff to Mrs. Todgers) were first inspirations. The 
MS. text too is full of the outward signs of care. But 
the author had his reward in the general impression of 
finish which is conveyed by this book as compared with 
its predecessors ; so that Martin Chuzzlewit may be de- 
scribed as already one of the masterpieces of Dickens's 
maturity as a writer. Oddly enough, the one part of the 
book which moves rather heavily is the opening chapter, 
an effort in the mock-heroic, probably suggested by the 
author's eighteenth century readings. 

A more original work, however, than Martin Chuzzlewit 
was never composed, or one which more freshly displays 
the most characteristic qualities of its author's genius. 
Though the actual construction of the story is anything 
but faultless — for what could be more slender than the 
thread by which the American interlude is attached to 
the main action, or more wildly improbable than the haz- 
ardous stratagem of old Martin upon which that action 
turns? — yet it is so contrived as to fulfil the author's 
avowed intention of exhibiting under various forms the 
evil and the folly of selfishness. This vice is capable of 
both serious and comic treatment, and commended itself 
in each aspect to Dickens as being essentially antagonistic 
to his moral and artistic ideals of human life. A true 
comedy of humours thus unfolded itself with the progress 
of his book, and one for which the types had not been 
fetched from afar : " Your homes the scene ; yourselves 
the actors here," had been the motto which he had at first 



56 DICKENS. [chap. 

intended to put upon his title-page. Thus, while in " the 
old-established firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son" self- 
ishness is cultivated as a growth excellent in itself, and the 
son's sentiment, " Do other men, for they would do you," 
is applauded by his admiring father, in young Martin the 
vice rather resembles a weed strong and rank, yet not so 
strong but that it gives way at last before a manly en- 
deavour to uproot it. The character of the hero, though 
very far from heroic, is worked out with that reliance 
upon the fellow-feeling of candid readers which in our 
great novelists of the eighteenth century has obtained 
sympathy for much less engaging personages. More es- 
pecially is the young man's loss of self-respect in the sea- 
son of his solitary wretchedness depicted with admirable 
feeling. It would not, I think, be fanciful to assert that 
in this story Dickens has with equal skill distinguished be- 
tween two species of unselfishness. Mark Taplej's is the 
actively unselfish nature, and though his reiteration of his 
guiding motive is wearisome and occasionally absurd, yet 
the power of coming out jolly under unpropitious cir- 
cumstances is a genuinely English ideal of manly virtue. 
Tom Pinch's character, on the other hand, is unselfish from 
innate sweetness ; and never has the art of Dickens drawn 
a type which, while closely approaching the border-line of 
the grotesque, is yet so charmingly true to nature. 

Grotesque characters proper are numerous enough in 
this book, but all the others pale before the immortal 
presence of Mrs. Gamp. She had been traced to an orig- 
inal in real life, but her literary right to stand on her own 
legs has been most properly vindicated against any suppo- 
sition of likeness to the different type, the subject of Leigh 
Hunt's Monthly Nurse — a paper, by-the-way, distinguished 
by shrewdness as well as feeling. Imagination has never 



in.] STRANGE LANDS. 5*7 

taken bolder flights than those requisite for the develop- 
ment of Mrs. Gamp's mental processes : 

" ' And which of all them smoking monsters is the Ankworks 
boat, I wonder ? Goodness me !' cried Mrs. Gamp. 

" ' What boat did you want ?' asked Ruth. 

" ' The Ankworks package,' Mrs. Gamp replied. ' I will not de- 
ceive you, my sweet. Why should I ?' 

" ' That is the Antwerp packet in the middle,' said Ruth. 

" ' And I wish it was in Jonadge's belly, I do !' cried Mrs. Gamp, 
appearing to confound the prophet with the whale in this miraculous 
aspiration." 

A hardly inferior exertion of creative power was needed 
in order to fix in distinct forms the peculiarities of her 
diction, nay, to sustain the unique rhythm of her speech: 

" ' I says to Mrs. Harris,' Mrs. Gamp continued, ' only t' other day, 
the last Monday fortnight as ever dawned upon this Piljian's Projiss 
of a mortal wale ; I says to Mrs. Harris, when she says to me, " Years 
and our trials, Mrs. Gamp, sets marks upon us all " — " Say not the 
words, Mrs. Harris, if you and me is to be continual friends, for sech 
is not the case." ' " 

Yet the reality of Mrs. Gamp has been acknowledged to 
be such that she has been the death of her sisterhood in a 
great part (to say the least) of our hospital wards and sick- 
rooms ; and as for her oddities of tongue, they are, with 
the exception of her boldest figures, but the glorified type 
of all the utterances heard to this day from charwomen, 
laundresses, and single gentlemen's house-keepers. Com- 
pared with her, even her friend and patron, Mr. Mould, and 
her admirer, Mr. Bailey, and in other parts of the book the 
low company at Todgers's and the fine company at Mr. 
Tigg Montague's sink into insignificance. The aged 
Chuffey is a grotesque study of a very different kind, of 

which the pathos never loses itself in exaggeration. As 
E 



58 DICKENS. [chap. 

for Pecksniff, he is as far out of the range of grotesque 
as, except when moralising over the banisters at Todgers's, 
he is out of that of genial characters. He is the richest 
comic type, while at the same time one of the truest, 
among the innumerable reproductions in English imagina- 
tive literature of our favourite national vice — hypocrisy. 
His friendliness is the very quintessence of falsehood : 
" Mr. Pinch," he cries to poor Tom over the currant-wine 
and captain's biscuits, " if you spare the bottle, we shall 
quarrel !" His understanding with his daughters is the 
very perfection of guile, for they confide in him, even when 
ignorant of his intentions, because of their certainty " that 
in all he does he has his purpose straight and full before 
him." And he is a man who understands the times as 
well as the land in which he lives ; for, as M. Taine has 
admirably pointed out, where Tartuffe would have been 
full of religious phrases, Pecksniff presents himself as a 
humanitarian philosopher. Comic art has never more suc- 
cessfully fulfilled its highest task after its truest fashion 
than in this picture of the rise and fall of a creature who 
never ceases to be laughable, and yet never ceases to be 
loathsome. Nothing is wanting in this wonderful book to 
attest the exuberance of its author's genius. The kindly 
poetic spirit of the Christmas books breathes in sweet 
Ruth Pinch ; and the tragic power of the closing chapters 
of Oliver Twist is recalled by the pipture of Jonas before 
and after his deed of blood. I say nothing of merely de- 
scriptive passages, though in none of his previous stories 
had Dickens so completely mastered the secret of describ- 
ing scenery and weather in their relation to his action or 
his characters. 

Martin Chuzzlewit ran its course of twenty monthly 
numbers; but already a week or two before the appear- 



iu.] STRANGE LANDS. 59 

ance of the first of these, Dickens had bestowed upon the 
public, young and old, the earliest of his delightful Christ- 
mas Books. Among all his productions perhaps none 
connected him so closely, and as it were personally, with 
his readers. Nor could it well have been otherwise; since 
nowhere was he so directly intent upon promoting kindli- 
ness of feeling among men — more especially good-will, 
founded upon respect, towards the poor. Cheerfulness 
was, from his point of view, twin- sister to charity; and 
sulkiness, like selfishness, belonged, as an appropriate ort, 
to the dust-heap of " Tom Tiddler's Ground." What more 
fit than that he should mingle such sentiments as these 
with the holly and the mistletoe of the only English holi- 
day in which remains a vestige of religious and poetic 
feeling? Beyond all doubt there is much that is tedious 
in the cultus of Father Christmas, and there was yet more 
in the days when the lower classes in England had not yet 
come to look upon a sufficiency of periodical holidays as 
part of their democratic inheritance. But that Dickens 
sh6uld constitute himself its chief minister and interpreter 
was nothing but fit. Already one of the Sketches had 
commended a Christmas - dinner at which a seat is not 
denied even to " poor Aunt Margaret ;" and Mr. Pickwick 
had never been more himself than in the Christmas game 
of Blind-manVbuff at Dingley Dell, in which "the poor 
relations caught the^people who they thought would like 
it," and, when the game flagged, " got caught themselves." 
But he now sought to reach the heart of the subject ; and 
the freshness of his fancy enabled him delightfully to vary 
his illustrations of a text of which it can do no man. harm 
to be reminded in as well as out of season. 

Dickens's Christmas books were published in the Christ- 
mas seasons of 1843-1846, and of 1848. If the palm is 



60 DICKENS. [chap. 

to be granted to any one among them above its fellows, 
few readers would hesitate, I think, to declare themselves 
in favour of The Cricket on the Hearth, as tender and deli- 
cate a domestic idyl as any literature can boast. But the 
informing spirit proper of these productions, the desire to 
stir up a feeling of benevolence, more especially towards 
the poor and lowly, nowhere shows itself more conspicu- 
ously than in the earliest, A Christmas Carol in Prose, 
and nowhere more combatively than in the second in 
date, the " Goblin Story " of The Chimes. Of the former 
its author declared that he " wept and laughed and wept 
again " over it, " and excited himself in a most extraordi- 
nary manner in the composition ; and thinking thereof he 
walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and 
twenty miles many a night, when all the sober folks had 
gone to bed." Simple in its romantic design like one of 
Andersen's little tales, the Christmas Carol has never lost 
its hold upon a public in whom it has called forth Christ- 
mas thoughts which do not all centre on " holly, mistletoe, 
red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, 
pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch ;" 
and the Cratchit household, with Tiny Tim, who did not 
die, are living realities even to those who have not seen 
Mr. Toole — an actor after Dickens's own heart — as the 
father of the family, shivering in his half-yard of com- 
forter. 

In The Chimes, composed in self-absorbed solitude at 
Genoa, he imagined that " he had written a tremendous 
book, and knocked the Carol out of the field." Though 
the little work failed to make "the great uproar" he had 
confidently anticipated, its purpose was certainly unmis- 
takable ; but the effect of hard exaggerations such as Mr. 
Filer and Alderman Cute, and of a burlesque absurdity 



hi.] STRANGE LANDS. 61 

like Sir Joseph Bowley, was too dreary to be counteracted 
by the more pleasing passages of the tale. In his novel 
Hard Times Dickens afterwards reproduced some of the 
ideas, and repeated some of the artistic mistakes, to be 
found in The Chimes, though the design of the later work 
was necessarily of a more mixed kind. The Christmas 
book has the tone of a doctrinaire protest against doctri- 
naires, and, as Forster has pointed out, is manifestly writ- 
ten under the influence of Carlyle. But its main doctrine 
was one which Dickens lost no opportunity of proclaim- 
ing, and which here breaks forth in the form of an indig- 
nant appeal by Richard Fern, the outlaw in spite of him- 
self : " Gentlefolks, be not hard upon the poor 1" No feel- 
ing was more deeply rooted in Dickens's heart than this ; 
nor could he forbear expressing it by invective and satire 
as well as by humorous and pathetic pictures of his 
clients, among whom Trotty Veck too takes a representa- 
tive place. 

The Cricket on the Hearth, as a true work of art, is not 
troubled about its moral, easily though half-a-dozen plain 
morals might be drawn from it ; a purer and more light- 
some creation of the fancy has never been woven out of 
homespun materials. Of the same imaginative type, 
though not executed with a fineness so surpassing, is The 
Battle of Life, the treatment of a fancy in which Dickens 
appears to have taken great pleasure. Indeed, he declared 
that he was " thoroughly wretched at having to use the 
idea for so short a story." As it stands, it is a pretty 
idyl of resignation, very poetical in tone as well as in 
conception, though here and there, notwithstanding the 
complaint just quoted, rather lengthy. It has been con- 
jectured, with much probability, that the success which 
had attended dramatic versions of Dickens's previous 



62 DICKENS. [chap. 

Christmas books caused " those admirable comedians, Mr. 
and Mrs. Keeley," to be in his mind " when he drew the 
charming characters of Britain and Clemency Newcome." 
At all events the pair serve as good old bits of English 
pottery to relieve the delicate Sevres sentiment of Grace 
and Marion. In the last of Dickens's Christmas books, 
The Haunted Man and the Ghosfs Bargain, he returns 
once more to a machinery resembling those of the earliest. 
But the fancy on which the action turns is here more 
forced, and the truth which it illustrates is after all only a 
half-truth, unless taken as part of the greater truth, that 
the moral conditions of man's life are more easily marred 
than mended. Once more the strength of the book lies 
in its humorous side. The picture of the good Milly's 
humble proteges, the Tetterby family, is to remind us that 
happiness consists precisely in that which the poor and 
the rich may alike obtain, but which it is so difficult for 
the poor, amidst their shifts and shabbiness, to keep fresh 
and green. Even without the evil influence of an enchant- 
ed chemist, it is hard enough for the Mrs. Tetterbys of 
real life always to be ministering angels to their families; 
for the hand of every little Tetterby not occasionally to 
be against the other little Tetterbys, and even for a de- 
voted Johnny's temper never to rise against Moloch. All 
the more is that to be cherished in the poor which makes 
them love one another. 

More than one of these Christmas books, both the hu- 
mour and the sentiment of which are so peculiarly Eng- 
lish, was written on foreign soil. Dickens's general con- 
ceptions of life, not less than his literary individuality, 
had been formed before he became a traveller and so- 
journer in foreign lands. In Italy, as elsewhere, a man 
will, in a sense, find only what he takes there. At all 



ni.] STRANGE LANDS. 63 

events the changed life brought with it for Dickens, 
though not at once, a refreshment and a brief repose 
which invigorated him for some of the truest efforts of 
his genius. His resolution to spend some time on the 
Continent had not been taken rashly, although it was at 
least hastened by business disappointments. He seems at 
this time, as was virtually inevitable, to have seen a good 
deal of society in London, and more especially to have 
become a welcome guest of Lady Blessington and Count 
d'Orsay at Gore Hbuse. Moreover, his services were be- 
ginning to be occasionally claimed as a public speaker; 
and altogether he must have found more of his time than 
he wished slipping through his hands. Lastly, he very 
naturally desired to see what was to be seen, and to enjoy 
what was to be enjoyed, by one gifted with a sleepless ob- 
servation and animated by a genuine love of nature and 
art. The letters, public and private, which he wrote from 
Italy, are not among the most interesting productions of 
his pen ; even his humour seems now and then ill at ease 
in them, and his descriptive power narrow in its range. 
His eyes were occasionally veiled, as are those of most 
travellers in quest of " first impressions." Thus I cannot 
but think his picture of Naples inadequate, and that of 
its population unjust. Again, although he may have told 
the truth in asserting that the Eternal City, at first sight, 
" looked like — I am half afraid to write the word — like 
London," and although his general description of Rome 
has been pronounced correct by competent judgment, yet 
it is impossible to ignore in it the undertone of Bow 
Bells. On the other hand, not even in his newspaper 
letters can he be said to fall into affectation ; his impres- 
sions are never given pretentiously, and are accordingly 
seldom altogether worthless; while his criticisms of works 



64 DICKENS. [chap. 

of art, when offered, are candid and shrewd, besides being 
invariably his own. 

Thus, there was never anything truer in its way than 
the account which he gave to Maclise of his first impres- 
sions a few days after his arrival at Albaro, a suburb of 
Genoa, where he found himself settled with his family in 
July, 1844. He re-christened his abode, the Villa Bagne- 
rello (" it sounds romantic, but Signor Banderello is a 
butcher hard by "), " the Pink Jail." Here, with abun- 
dance of space and time, and with a view from his writ- 
ing-table of " the sea, the mountains, the washed-out vil- 
las, the vineyards, the blistering hot fort, with a sentry 
on the drawbridge standing in a bit of shadow no broad- 
er than his own musket, and the sky," he began his vil- 
legyiatura, and resolving not to know, or to be known 
where it could be helped, looked round him at his leisure. 
This looking round very naturally took up some time ; for 
the circuit of Dickens's daily observation was unusually 
wide. Soon he was seeking winter-quarters in Genoa it- 
self, and by October was established in the Palazzo Pes- 
chiere, situate on a height within the walls of the city, 
and overlooking the whole of it, with the harbour and 
the sea beyond. " There is not in Italy, they say (and I 
believe them), a lovelier residence." Even here, however, 
among fountains and frescoes, it was some time before he 
could set steadily to work at his Christmas story. At last 
the bells of Genoa chimed a title for it into his restless 
ears; and, though longing with a nostalgy that was spe- 
cially strong upon him at periods of mental excitement for 
his nightly walks in the London streets, he settled down to 
his task. I have already described the spirit in which he 
executed it. No sooner was the writing done than the 
other half of his double artist-nature was seized with an- 



in.] STRANGE LANDS. 65 

other craving. The rage which possesses authors to read 
their writings aloud to sympathizing ears, if such can be 
found, is a well-worn theme of satire ; but in Dickens the 
actor was almost as strong as the author, and he could not 
withstand the desire to interpret in person what he had 
written, and to watch its effect with his own eyes and ears. 
In the first days of November, therefore, he set off from 
Genoa, and made his way home by Bologna, Venice, Milan, 
and the Simplon Pass. Of this journey his Pictures from 
Italy contains the record, including a chapter about Ven- 
ice, pitched in an unusually poetic key. But not all the 
memories of all the Doges could have stayed the execu- 
tion of his set purpose. On the 30th of November he 
reached London, and on the 2d of December he was read- 
ing the Chimes, from the proofs, to the group of friends 
immortalised in Maclise's inimitable sketch. Three days 
afterwards the reading was repeated to a slightly different 
audience ; and, indeed, it would seem, from an enthusias- 
tic postscript to a letter addressed to his wife, that he had 
read at least part of the book to Macready on the night 
before that of the first conclave. The distance was no 
doubt wide between the intimacy of these friendly read- 
ings and the stormy seas of public audiences; but, how- 
ever unconsciously, the first step had been taken. It may 
be worth noticing, in connexion with this, that the scheme 
of a private dramatic performance, which was to occupy 
much of Dickens's "leisure" in the year following, was 
proposed for the first time on the occasion of the first 
reading of the Chimes. Before Christmas he was back 
again in his " Italian bowers." If the strain of his effort 
in writing the Chimes had been severe, the holiday which 
followed was long. In the later winter and early spring 
of 1845 he and the ladies of his family saw Rome and 
4 



66 DICKENS. [chap. 

Naples, and in June their Italian life came to an end, and 
they were in London before the close of the month. Proj- 
ects of work remained in abeyance until the absorbing 
fancy of a private play had been realised with an earnest- 
ness such as only Dickens could carry into his amuse- 
ments, and into this particular amusement above all oth- 
ers. The play was Every Man in his Humour ; the thea- 
tre, the little house in Dean Street, of whose chequered 
fortunes no theatrical history has succeeded in exhaust- 
ing the memories; and the manager was, of course, "Bob- 
adil," as Dickens now took to signing himself. His jok- 
ing remark to Macready, that he " thought of changing 
his present mode of life, and was open to an engagement," 
was after all not so very wide of the mark. According 
to the inevitable rule in such things, he and his friends 
— among whom Mark Lemon, Douglas Jerrold, and Fors- 
ter were conspicuous — were "induced" to repeat their 
performance at a larger house for a public charity, and 
later in the year they played The Elder Brother for Miss 
Fanny Kelly's benefit. Leigh Hunt, whose opinion, how- 
ever, could hardly fail to be influenced by the circumstances 
under which Ben Jonson's comedy was afterwards per- 
formed by the amateurs, and who was no longer the 
youthful Draco of the Neios, afterwards spoke very high- 
ly of Dickens's Bobadil. It had "a spirit in it of intel- 
lectual apprehension beyond anything the existing stage 
has shown." His acting in the farce which followed 
Leigh Hunt thought " throughout admirable ; quite rich 
and filled up." 

Christmas, 1845, had passed, and The Cricket on the 
Hearth had graced the festival, when an altogether new 
chapter in Dickens's life seemed about to open for him. 
The experience through which he now passed was one on 



m.] STRANGE LANDS. 67 

which his biographer, for reasons easy to guess, has touch- 
ed very slightly, while his Letters throw no additional 
light on it at all. Most people, I imagine, would decline 
to pronounce upon the qualifications requisite in an editor 
of a great political journal. Yet, literary power of a kind 
which acts upon the multitude rapidly and powerfully, 
habits of order so confirmed as to have almost become 
second nature, and an interest in the affairs of the nation 
fed by an ardent enthusiasm for its welfare — these would 
seem to go some way towards making up the list. Of all 
these qualifications Dickens at various times gave proof, 
and they sufficed in later years to make him the successful 
conductor of a weekly journal which aimed at the enlight- 
enment hardly less than at the entertainment of no incon- 
siderable portion of the British public. But, in the first 
place, political journalism proper is a craft of which very 
few men have been known to become masters by intui- 
tion, and Dickens had as yet had no real experience of it. 
His zealous efforts as a reporter can hardly be taken into 
account here. He had for a short time edited a miscel- 
lany of amusement, and had failed to carry beyond a be- 
ginning the not very carefully considered scheme of an- 
other. Recently, he had resumed the old notion of Mas- 
ter Humphrey's Clock in a different shape ; but nothing 
had come of his projected cheap weekly paper for the 
present, while its title, " The Cricket" was reserved for a 
different use. Since his reporting days he had, however, 
now and then appeared among the lighter combatants of 
political literature. In 1841 he had thrown a few squibs 
in the Examiner at Sir Robert Peel and the Tories ; and 
from about the same date he had, besides occasionally 
contributing to the literary and theatrical columns of the 
same weekly journal, now and then discussed in it sub- 



68 DICKENS. [chap. 

jects of educational or other general interest. 1 Finally, it 
is stated by Forster that in 1844, when the greatest polit- 
ical struggle of the last generation was approaching its 
climax, Dickens contributed some articles to the Morning 
Chronicle which attracted attention and led to negotia- 
tions with the editor that arrived at no positive result. If 
these contributions treated any political questions what- 
ever, they were, with the exception of the few Examiner 
papers, and of the letters to the Daily News to be men^- 
tioned in this chapter, the only articles of this kind which, 
to my knowledge, he ever wrote. 

For, from first to last, whether in the days when Oliver 
Twist suffered under the maladministration of the Poor- 
law, or in those when Arthur Clennam failed to make an 
impression upon the Circumlocution Office, politics were 
with Dickens a sentiment rather than a study or a pursuit. 
With his habits of application and method, it might have 
taken but a very short time for him to train himself as a 
politician ; but this short time never actually occurred. 
There is, however, no reason to suppose that when, in 
1841, a feeler was put out by some more or less influential 
persons at Reading, with regard to his willingness to be 
nominated for the representation of that borough, he had 
any reason for declining the proposal besides that which 
he stated in his replies. He could not afford the requisite 
expense ; and he was determined not to forfeit his inde- 
pendence through accepting Government — by which I hope 
he means Whig party — aid for meeting the cost of the 
contest. Still, in 1845, though slack of faith in the " peo- 
ple who govern us," he had not yet become the irreclaim- 

1 From a list of MSS. at South Kensington, kindly furnished me 
by Mr. R. F. Sketch ley, I find that Mr. R. H. Shepherd's Bibliography 
of Dickens is incomplete on this head. 



hi.] STRANGE LANDS. «9 

able political sceptic of later days; and without being in 
any way bound to the "Whigs, he had that general confi- 
dence in Lord John Russell which was all they could ex~ 
poet from their irregular followers. As yet, however, he 
had shown no sign of any special aptitude or inclination 
for political work, though if he addressed himself to ques- 
tions affecting the health and happiness of the humbler 
classes, he was certain to bring to them the enthusiasm of 
a genuine sympathy. And a question of this kind was 
uppermost in Englishmen's minds in this year 1845, when 
at last the time was drawing near for the complete aboli- 
tion of the tax upon the staple article of the poor man's 
daily food. 

The establishment of a new London morning paper, on 
the scale to which those already in existence had attained, 
was a serious matter in itself ; but it seems to have been 
undertaken in no spirit of diffidence by the projectors and 
first proprietors of the Daily News. With the early his- 
tory of the experiment I cannot here concern myself; it 
is, however, an open secret that the rate of expenditure of 
the new journal was at first on a most liberal, not to say 
lavish, scale, and that the losses of the proprietors were for 
many years very large indeed. Established on those prin- 
ciples of Radicalism which, on the whole, it has in both 
good and evil times consistently maintained, the Daily 
News was to rise superior to the opportunism, if not to 
the advertisements, of the Times, and to outstrip the cau- 
tious steps of the Whig Morning Chronicle. Special at- 
tention was to be given to those industrial enterprises with 
which the world teemed in that speculative age, and no 
doubt also to those social questions affecting the welfare 
and elevation of the masses and the relations between em- 
ployers and employed, which were attracting more and 



70 DICKENS. [chap. 

more of the public attention. But in the first instance 
the actual political situation would oblige the new journal 
to direct the greater part of its energies to one particular 
question, which had, in truth, already been threshed out 
by the organs of public opinion, and as to which the time 
for action had at last arrived. No Liberal journal project- 
ed in 1845, and started early in 1846, could fail to con- 
centrate its activity for a time upon the question of the 
Corn-laws, to which the session of 1846 was to give the 
death-blow. 

It is curious enough, on opening the first number of the 
Daily News, dated January 21, 1846, to find one's self trans- 
planted into the midst of one of the most memorable epi- 
sodes of our more recent political history. The very ad- 
vertisements of subscriptions to the Anti-Corn-law League, 
with the good old Manchester names figuring conspicuous- 
ly among them, have a historic interest ; and the report of 
a disputation on free-trade at Norwich, in which all the 
hits are made by Mr. Cobden, another report of a great 
London meeting on the same subject, and some verses con- 
cerning the people's want of its bread, probably written by 
Mr. Charles Mackay, occupy an entire page of the paper. 
Railway news and accounts of railway meetings fill about 
the same space ; while the foreign news is extremely mea- 
gre. There remain the leading articles, four in number — 
of which three are on the burning question of the day — 
and the first of a series of Travelling Letters Written on 
the Road, by Charles Dickens (the Avignon chapter in the 
Pictures from Daly.) 1 The hand of the editor is tracc- 

1 By an odd coincidence, not less than four out of the six theatres 
advertising their performances in this first number of the Daily News 
announce each a different adaptation of The Cricket on the Hearth. 
Amongst the curiosities of the casts are observable : At the Adelphi, 



in.] STkANGE LANDS. 71 

able only in this feuilleton and in the opening article of 
the new paper. On internal evidence I conclude that this 
article, which has little to distinguish it from similar man- 
ifestoes, unless it be a moderation of tone that would not 
have suited Captain Shandon, was not written by Dickens 
alone or unassisted. But his hand is traceable in the con- 
cluding paragraphs, which contain the following wordy but 
spirited assertion of a cause that Dickens lost no opportu- 
nity of advocating : 

"We seek, so far as in us lies, to elevate the character of the Pub- 
lic Press in England. We believe it would attain a much higher po- 
sition, and that those who wield its powers would be infinitely more 
respected as a class, and an important one, if it were purged of a dis- 
position to sordid attacks upon itself, which only prevails in England 
and America. We discern nothing in the editorial plural that justi- 
tifies a gentleman, or body of gentlemen, in discarding a gentleman's 
forbearance and responsibility, and venting ungenerous spleen against 
a rival, by a perversion of a great power — a power, however, which is 
only great so long as it is good and honest. The stamp on newspa- 
pers is not like the stamp on universal medicine-bottles, which licenses 
anything, however false and monstrous ; and we are sure this misuse 
of it, in any notorious case, not only offends and repels right-minded 
men in that particular instance, but naturally, though unjustly, in- 
volves the whole Press, as a pursuit or profession, in the feeling so 
awakened, and places the character of all who are associated with it 
at a great disadvantage. 

" Entering on this adventure of a new daily journal in a spirit of 
honourable competition and hope of public usefulness, we seek, in 
our new station, at once to preserve our own self-respect, and to be 
respected, for ourselves and for it, by our readers. Therefore, we 

Wright as Tilly Slowboy, and at the Haymarket Buckstone in the 
same character, with William Farren as Caleb Plummer. The latter 
part is taken at the Princess's by Compton, Mrs. Stirling playing Dot. 
At the Lyceum, Mr., Mrs., and Miss Mary Keeley, and Mr. Emery, ap- 
pear in the piece. 



12 DICKENS. [chap. 

beg them to receive, in this our first number, the assurance that no 
recognition or interchange of trade abuse, by us, shall be the destruc- 
tion of either sentiment ; and that we intend proceeding on our way, 
and theirs, without stooping to any such flowers by the roadside." 

I am unable to say how many days it was after the ap- 
pearance of this first number that Dickens, or the proprie- 
tors of the journal, or, as seems most likely, both sides si- 
multaneously, began to consider the expediency of ending 
the connexion between them. He was " revolving plans 
for quitting the paper" on January 30, and resigned his 
editorship on February 9 following. In the interval, with 
the exception of two or three more of the Travelling Let- 
ters, very few signs of his hand appear in the journal. 
The number of January 24, however, contains an edito- 
rial contribution, in the shape of " a new song, but an 
old story," concerning The British Lion, his accomplish- 
ment of eating Corn - law Leagues, his principal keeper, 
Wan Humbug, and so forth. This it would be cruel to 
unearth. A more important indication of a line of writ- 
ing that his example may have helped to domesticate in 
the Daily News appears in the number of February 4, 
which contains a long letter, with his signature, urging 
the claims of Ragged Schools, and giving a graphic ac- 
count of his visit to one in Saffron Hill. After he had 
placed his resignation in the hands of the proprietors, and 
was merely holding on at his post till the time of his act- 
ual withdrawal, he was naturally not anxious to increase 
the nqmber of his contributions. The Hymn of the Wilt- 
shire Labourers — which appeared on February 14 — is, of 
course, an echo of the popular cry of the day ; but the 
subtler pathos of Dickens never found its way into his 
verse. The most important, and so far as I know, the 
last, of his contributions to the Daily News, consisted of 



hi.] STRANGE LANDS. 73 

a series of three letters (March 9, 13, and 16) on capital 
punishment. It was a question which much occupied 
him at various times of his life, and on which it can- 
not be shown that he really changed his opinions. The 
letters in the Daily News, based in part on the arguments 
of one of the ablest men of his day, the " unlucky " Mr. 
Wakefield, are an interesting contribution to the subject; 
and the first of them, with its Hogarthian sketch of the 
temptation and fall of Thomas Hocker, Sunday - school 
teacher and murderer, would be worth reprinting as an 
example of Dickens's masterly use of the argument ex 
concrete. 

The few traditions which linger in the Daily News of- 
fice concerning Dickens as editor of the paper, agree with 
the conjecture that his labours on its behalf were limited, 
or very nearly so, to the few pieces enumerated above. 
Of course there must have been some inevitable business; 
but of this much may have been taken off his hands by 
his sub-editor, Mr. W. H. Wills, who afterwards became 
his alter ego at the office of his own weekly journal and 
his intimate personal friend. In the days of the first in- 
fancy of the Daily News, Mr. Britton, the present pub- 
lisher of that journal, was attached to the editor as his 
personal office attendant ; and he remembers very vividly 
what little there can have been to remember about Dick- 
ens's performance of his functions. His habit, following 
a famous precedent, was to make up for coming late — 
usually about half-past ten p.m. — by going away early — 
usually not long after midnight. There were frequently 
sounds of merriment, if not of modest revelry, audible 
from the little room at the office in Lombard Street, where 
the editor sat in conclave with Douglas Jerrold and one 
or two other intimates. Mr. Britton is not sure that the 
F 4* 



74 DICKENS. [chap. 

work did not sometimes begin after the editor had left; 
but at all events he cannot recollect that Dickens ever 
wrote anything at the office — that he ever, for instance, 
wrote about a debate that had taken place in Parliament 
on the same night. And he sums up his reminiscences by 
declaring his conviction that Dickens was " not a news- 
paper man, at least not when in ' the chair.' " And so 
Dickens seems on this occasion to have concluded ; for 
when, not long after quitting the paper, he republished 
with additions the Travelling Letters which during his 
conduct of it had been its principal ornaments, he spoke 
of " a brief mistake he had made, not long ago, in disturb- 
ing the old relations between himself and his readers, and 
departing for a moment from his old pursuits." He had 
been virtually out of " the chair" almost as soon as he had 
taken it. His successor, but only for a few months, was 
his friend Forster. 

Never has captive released made a more eager or a bet- 
ter use of his recovered freedom. Before the summer 
had fairly set in Dickens had let his house, and was travel- 
ling with his family up the Rhine towards Switzerland. 
This was, I think, Dickens's only passage through Ger- 
many, which in language and literature remained a terra 
incognita to him, while in various ways so well known to 
his friendly rivals, Lord Lytton and Thackeray. He was 
on the track of poor Thomas Hood's old journeyings, 
whose facetious recollections of Rhineland he had some 
years before reviewed in a spirit of admiration rather 
for the author than for the book, funny as it is. His 
point of destination was Lausanne, where he had resolved 
to establish his household for the summer, and where by 
the middle of June they were most agreeably settled in 
a little villa or cottage which did not belie its name of 



mi. I STRANGE LANDS. 75 

Roscmont, and from which they looked upon the lake and 
the mighty Alpine chain beyond. If Rome had reminded 
Dickens of London, the green woods near Lausanne re- 
called to him his Kentish glades ; but he had the fullest 
sense and the truest enjoyment of the grandeurs of Alpine 
scenery, and lost no opportunity of becoming acquainted 
with them. Thus his letters contain an admirable descrip- 
tion (not untinged with satire) of a trip to the Great St. 
Bernard and its convent, many years afterwards repro- 
duced in one of the few enjoyable chapters of the Second 
Part of Little Dorrit. More interesting, however, because 
more characteristic, is the freshness and candour with 
which in Switzerland, where b} r most English visitors the 
native inhabitants are " taken for granted," he set himself 
to observe, and, so far as he could, to appreciate, the peo- 
ple among whom he was a temporary resident. His solu- 
tions of some of the political difficulties, which were mostly 
connected with religious differences, at that time rife in 
Switzerland, are palpably one-sided. But the generosity 
of spirit which reveals itself in his kindly recognition of 
the fine qualities of the people around him is akin to what 
was best and noblest in Dickens. 

He had, at the same time, been peculiarly fortunate in 
finding at Lausanne a circle of pleasant acquaintances, 
to whom he dedicated the Christmas book which he wrote 
among the roses and the foliage of his lake-side cottage. 
Of course The Battle of Life was read aloud by its author 
to so kindly an audience.. The day of parting, however, 
soon came ; on the 1 6th of November paterfamilias had 
his "several tons of luggage, other tons of servants, and 
other tons of children," in travelling order, and soon had 
safely stowed them away at Paris " in the most preposter- 
ous house in the world. The like of it cannot, and so far 



76 DICKENS. [chap. 

as my knowledge goes, does not, exist in any other part 
of the globe. The bedrooms are like opera-boxes ; the. 
dining-rooms, staircases, and passages quite inexplicable. 
The dining-room " — which in another letter he describes 
as "mere midsummer madness" — "is a sort of cavern, 
painted (ceiling and all) to represent a grove, with unac- 
countable bits of looking-glass sticking in among the 
branches of the trees. There is a gleam of reason in the 
drawing-room, but it is approached through a series of 
small chambers, like the joints in a telescope, which are 
hung with inscrutable drapery." Here, with the excep- 
tion of two brief visits to England, paid before his final 
departure, he spent three months, familiarising himself for 
the first time of his life with the second of his " Two 
Cities." 

Dickens came to know the French language well enough 
to use it with ease, if not with elegance ; and he lost no 
opportunity, it need hardly be said, of resorting to the 
best of schools for the purpose. Macready, previously ad- 
dressed from " Altorf," had made him acquainted with 
Regnier, of the Theatre Franc.ais, who in his turn had in- 
troduced him to the greenroom of the house of Moliere.. 
Other theatres were diligently visited by him and Forster, 
when the latter arrived on a visit ; and celebrities were 
polite and hospitable to their distinguished English con- 
frere. With these, however, Dickens was not cosmopoli- 
tan enough to consort except in passing ; the love of liter- 
ary society because it is literary society was at no time one 
of his predilections or foibles. The streets of Paris were 
to him more than its salons, more even than its theatres. 
They are so to a larger number of Englishmen^ than that 
which cares to confess it, but Dickens would have been 
the last to disown the impeachment. They were the. 



m.j STRANGE LANDS. If 

proper sphere for his powers of humorous observation, as 
he afterwards showed in more than one descriptive paper 
as true to life as any of his London Sketches. And, more- 
over, he needed the streets for the work which he had in 
hand. Dombey and Son had been begun at Rosemont, 
and the first of its twenty monthly numbers had been 
published in October, 1846. No reader of the book is 
likely to forget how, after writing the chapter which re- 
lates the death of little Paul, Dickens during the greater 
part of the night wandered restlessly with a heavy heart 
about the Paris streets. Sooner, however, than he had in- 
tended, his residence abroad had to come to a close ; and 
early in 1847 he and his family were again in London. 

Dombey and Son has, perhaps, been more criticised than 
any other amongst the stories of its author ; and yet it cer- 
tainly is not the one which has been least admired, or least 
loved. Dickens himself, in the brief preface which he af- 
terwards prefixed to the story, assumed a half-defiant air 
which sits ill upon the most successful author, but which 
occasionally he was tempted to assume. Before conde- 
scending to defend the character of Mr. Dombey as in ac- 
cordance with both probability and experience, he " made 
so bold as to believe that the faculty (or the habit) of 
correctly observing the characters of men is a rare one." 
Yet, though the drawing of this character is only one of 
the points which have been objected against the story, not 
only did the book at the time of publication far surpass 
its predecessor in popularity, but it has, I believe, always 
preserved to itself a special congregation of enthusiastic 
admirers. Manifestly, this novel is one of its author's 
most ambitious endeavours. In it, more distinctly even 
than in Chuzzlewit, he has chosen for his theme one of 
the chief vices of human nature, and has striven to show 



78 DICKENS. [chap. 

what pride cannot achieve, what it cannot conquer, what 
it cannot withstand. This central idea gives to the story, 
throughout a most varied succession of scenes, a unity of 
action to be found in few of Dickens's earlier works. On 
the other hand, Dombey and Son shares with these earlier 
productions, and with its successor, David Copper field, the 
freshness of invention and spontaneous flow of both hu- 
mOur and pathos which at times are wanting in the more 
powerfully conceived and more carefully constructed ro- 
mances of Dickens's later years. If there be any force at 
all in the common remark that the most interesting part 
of the book ends together with' the life of little Paul, the 
censure falls upon the whole design of the author. Little 
Paul, in something besides the ordinary meaning of the 
words, was born to die; and though, like the writer, most 
readers may have dreaded the hour which was to put an 
end to that frail life, yet in this case there could be no 
question — such as was possible in the story of Little Nell 
— of any other issue. Indeed, deep as is the pathos of 
the closing scene, its beailty is even surpassed by those 
which precede it. In death itself there is release for a 
child as for a man, and for those sitting by the pillow of 
the patient ; but it is the gradual approach of death which 
seems hardest of all for the watchers to bear ; it is the 
sinking of hope which seems even sadder than its extinc- 
tion. What old fashion could that be, Paul wondered 
with a palpitating heart, that was so visibly expressed in 
him, so plainly seen by so many people? Every heart is 
softened and every eye dimmed as the innocent child 
passes on his way to his grave. The hand of God's angel 
is on him ; he is no longer altogether of this world. The 
imagination which could picture and present this myste- 
rious haze of feeling, through which the narrative moves, 



in.] STRANGE LANDS. 79 

half like a reality, half like a dream, is that of a true poet, 
and of a great one. 

What even the loss of his son could not effect in Mr. 
Dombey is to be accomplished in the progress of the story 
by a yet stronger agency than sorrow. His pride is to be 
humbled to the dust, where he is to be sought and raised 
up by the love of his despised and ill-used daughter. 
Upon the relations between this pair, accordingly, it was 
necessary for the author to expend the greatest care, and 
upon the treatment of those relations the criticism to 
which the character of Mr. Dombey has been so largely 
subjected must substantially turn. The unfavourable judg- 
ments passed upon it have, in my opinion, not been alto- 
gether unjust. The problem obviously was to show how 
the father's cold indifference towards the daughter gradu- 
ally becomes jealousy, as he finds that upon her is concen- 
trated, first, the love of his innocent little son, and then 
that of his haughty second wife; and how hereupon this 
jealousy deepens into hate. But, unless we are to suppose 
that Mr. Dombey hated his daughter from the first, the 
disfavour shown by him on her account to young Walter 
Gay remains without adequate explanation. His dislike 
of Florence is not manifestly founded upon his jealousy 
of what Mrs. Chick calls her brother's " infatuation " for 
her; and the main motives at work in the unhappy man 
are either not very skilfully kept asunder, or not very in- 
telligibly intermixed. Nor are the later stages of the re- 
lations between father and daughter altogether satisfacto- 
rily conceived. The momentary yielding of Mr. Dombey, 
after his "coming home" with his new wife, is natural 
and touching; but his threat to visit his daughter with 
the consequences of her step-mother's conduct is sheer bru- 
tality. The passage in which Mr. Dombey's ultimatum to 



80 DICKENS. [chap. 

Mrs. Dombey is conveyed by him in her presence through 
s, third person is so artificial as to fall not very far 
sh»rt of absurdity. The closing scene which leads to the 
flight of Florence is undeniably powerful ; but it is the 
development of the relations between the pair in which 
the art of the author is in my judgment occasionally at 
fault. 

As to the general effect of the latter part of the story 
— or rather of its main plot — which again has been con- 
demned as melodramatic and unnatural, a distinction should 
be drawn between its incidents and its characters. Nei- 
ther Edith Dombey nor Mr. Carter is a character of real 
life. The pride of the former comes very near to bad 
breeding, and her lapses into sentiment seem artificial lapses. 
How differently Thackeray would have managed the " high 
words" between her and her frivolous mother! how differ- 
ently, for that matter, he has managed a not altogether dis- 
similar scene in the Newcomes between Ethel Newcome and 
old Lady Kew ! As for Mr. Carker, with his white teeth 
and glistening gums, who calls his unhappy brother " Span- 
iel," and contemplates a life of sensual ease in Sicily, he 
has the semi-reality of the stage. Possibly the French 
stage had helped to suggest the scene de la piece between 
the fugitives at Dijon — an effective situation, but one which 
many a novelist might have worked out not less skilfully 
than Dickens. His own master-hand, however, re-asserts 
itself in the wondrously powerful narrative of Carker's 
flio-ht and death. Here again he excites terror — as in the 
same book he had evoked pity — by foreshadowing, with- 
out prematurely revealing, the end. We know what the 
morning is to bring which rises in awful tranquillity over 
the victim of his own sins; and, as in Turner's wild but 



in.] STRANGE LANDS. 81 

powerful picture, the engine made by the hand of man for 
peaceful purposes seems a living agent of wrath. 1 

No other of Dickens's books is more abundantly stocked 
than this with genuinely comic characters ; but nearly all 
of them, in accordance with the pathetic tone which is 
struck at the outset, and which never dies out till the story 
has run its course, are in a more subdued strain of humour. 
Lord Jeffrey was, I think, warranted in his astonishment 
that Dickens should devote so much pains to characters 
like Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox. Probably the habit re- 
mained with him from his earliest times of authorship, 
when he had not always distinguished very accurately be- 
tween the humorous and the bizarre. But Polly and the 
Toodles household, Mrs. Pipchin and her " select infan- 
tine boarding-house," and the whole of Doctor Blimber's 
establishment, from the Doctor himself down to Mr. Toots, 
and up again, in the scale of intellect, to Mr. Feeder, B.A., 
are among the most admirable of all the great humourist's 
creations. Against this ample provision for her poor little 
brother's nursing and training Florence has to set but her 
one Susan Nipper ; but she is a host in herself, an abso- 
lutely original character among the thousands of soubrettes 
that are known to comedy and fiction, and one of the best 
tonic mixtures ever composed out of much humour and 
not a few grains of pathos. Her tartness has a cooling 
flavour of its own ; but it is the Mrs. Pipchinses only 

1 It is, perhaps, worth pointing out, though it is not surprising, 
that Dickens had a strong sense of what I may call the poetry of 
the railway-train. Of the effect of the weird Signabnaii's Story in 
one of his Christmas numbers it is not very easy to rid one's self. 
There are excellent descriptions of the rapidity of a railway journey 
in the first chapter of The Lazy Tour, and in another Household 
Wards paper, called A Flight. 



82 DICKENS. [chap. 

upon whom she acts, as their type acted upon her, " like 
early gooseberries." Of course she has a favourite figure of 
speech belonging to herself, which rhetoricians would prob- 
ably class among the figures " working by surplusage:" 

" ' Your Toxes and your Chickses may draw out my two front 
double teeth, Mrs. Richards, but that's no reason why I need offer 
'em the whole set.' " 

Dickens was to fall very largely into this habit of "la- 
belling" his characters, as it has been called, by particular 
tricks or terms of speech ; and there is a certain excess 
in this direction already in Dombey and Sou, where not 
only Miss Nipper and Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots, but 
Major Bagstock too and Cousin Feenix, are thus furnished 
forth. But the invention is still so fresh and the play of 
humour so varied, that this mannerism cannot be said as 
yet seriously to disturb them. A romantic charm of a pe- 
culiar kind clings to honest Captain Cuttle and the quaint 
home over which he mounts guard during the absence of 
its owner. The nautical colouring and concomitant fun 
apart — for only Smollett could have drawn Jack Bunsby's 
fellow, though the character in his hands would have been 
differently accentuated — Dickens has never approached 
more nearly to the manner of Sir Walter Scott than in 
this singularly attractive part of his book. Elsewhere 
the story passes into that sphere of society in describing 
which Dickens was, as a novelist, rarely very successful. 
But though Edith is cold and unreal, there is, it cannot 
be denied, human nature in the pigments and figments of 
her hideous old mother; and, to outward appearance at all 
events, the counterparts of her apoplectic admirer, Major 
Bagstock, still juice those pavements and promenades 
which it suits them to frequent. Cousin Feenix is like- 



in.] STRANGE LANDS. 88 

wise very far from impossible, and is besides extremely 
delightful — and a good fellow too at bottom, so that the 
sting- of the satire is here taken away. On the other hand, 
the meeting between the sacs et parchemins at Mr. Dom- 
bey's house is quite out of focus. 

The book has other heights and depths, and pleasant 
and unpleasant parts and passages. But enough has been 
said to recall the exuberant creative force, and the marvel- 
lous strength of pathos and humour which Domhey and 
Son proves that Dickens, now near the very height of his 
powers as a writer of fiction, possessed. In one of his 
public readings many years afterwards, when he was re- 
citing the adventures of Little Doinbey, he narrates that 
" a very good fellow," whom he noticed in the stalls, could 
not refrain from wiping the tears out of his eyes as often 
as he thought that Toots was coming on. And just as 
Toots had become a reality to this good fellow, so Toots 
and Toots's little friend, and divers other personages in 
this story, have become realities to half the world that 
reads the English tongue, and to many besides. What 
higher praise could be given to this wonderful book ? Of 
all the works of its author none has more powerfully and 
more permanently taken hold of the imagination of its 
readers. Though he conjured up only pictures familiar to 
us from the aspect of our own streets and our own homes, 
he too wielded a wizard's wand. 

After the success of Domhey it might have seemed that 
nothing further was wanting to crown the prosperity of 
Dickens's literary career. While the publication of this 
story was in progress he had concluded arrangements for 
the issue of his collected writings, in a cheap edition, which 
began in the year 1847, and which he dedicated "to the 
English people, in whose approval, if the books be true 



84 DICKENS. [chap. hi. 

in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they 
be false, they will very soon die." He who could thus 
proudly appeal to posterity was already, beyond all dis- 
pute, the people's chosen favourite among its men of let- 
ters. That position he was not to lose so long as he 
lived ; but even at this time the height had not been 
reached to which (in the almost unanimous judgment of 
those who love his writings) he was in his next work to 
attain. 



CHAPTER IV. 

" DAVID COPPERFIELD." 
[1847-1851.] 

The five years, reckoned roughly, from the beginning of 
1847 to the close of 1851, were most assuredly the season 
in which the genius of Dickens produced its richest and 
rarest fruit. When it opened he was still at work upon 
Dombey and Son; towards its end he was already en- 
gaged upon the earliest portions of Bleak House. And it 
was during the interval that he produced a book cherished 
by himself with an affection differing in kind, as well as 
in degree, from the common fondness of an author for his 
literary offspring, and a pearl without a peer amongst the 
later fictions of our English school — David Copper field. 
To this period also belong, it is true, not a few lesser pro- 
ductions of the same ready pen ; for the last of his Christ- 
mas books was written in 1848, and in 1850 his weekly 
periodical, Household Words, began to run its course. 
There was much play too in these busy years, but all more 
or less of the kind which his good-humoured self-irony 
afterwards very correctly characterised : 

" ' Play !' said Thomas Idle. ' Here is a man goes systematically 
tearing himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant 
course of training, as if he were always under articles to fight a 
>match for the champion's belt, and he calls it "Play." Play!' ex- 



80 DICKENS. [chap. 

claimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one boot in the 
air; 'you can't play. You don't know what it is. You make work 
of everything !' " 

" A man," added the same easy philosopher, " who can 
do nothing by halves appears to me to be a fearful man." 
And as at all times in Dickens's life, so most emphatically 
in these years when his physical powers seemed ready to 
meet every demand, and the elasticity of his mind seemed 
equal to every effort, he did nothing by halves. Within 
this short space of time not only did he write his best 
book, and conduct a weekly journal of solid merit through 
its most trying stage, but he 'also established his reputa- 
tion as one of the best " unpolitical " speakers in the coun- 
try; and as an amateur actor and manager successfully 
weathered what may be called three theatrical seasons, to 
the labours and glories of which it would be difficult to 
find a parallel even in the records of that most exacting 
of all social amusements. One likes to think of him in 
tliese years of vigorous manhood, no longer the fair youth 
with the flowing locks of Maclise's charming portrait, but 
not yet, I suppose, altogether the commanding and rather 
stern presence of later years. Mr. Frith's portrait was not 
painted till 1859, by which time the face occasionally had 
a more set expression, and the entire personality a more 
weather-beaten appearance, than this well-known picture 
suggests. But even eight years before this date, when 
Dickens was acting in Lord Lytton's comedy the part of a 
young man of mode, Mr. Sala's well-known comparison of 
his outward man to " some prosperous sea-captain home 
from a sea- voyage," was thought applicable to him by 
another shrewd observer, Mr. R. II. Home, who says that, 
fashionable " make-up " notwithstanding, " he presented a 
figure that would have made a good portrait of a Dutch 



iv.] "DAVID GOPPERFIELD." 87 

privateer after having taken a capital prize." And in 
1856 Ary Scheffcr, to whom when sitting for his portrait. 
he had excused himself for being a difficult subject, " re- 
ceived the apology as strictly his due, and said, with a 
vexed air, ' At this moment, mon cher Dickens, you look 
more like an energetic Dutch admiral than anything else ;' 
for which I apologised again." In 1853, in the sympa- 
thetic neighbourhood of Boulogne, he was " growing a 
mustache," and, by 1856, a beard of the Henri Quatre 
type had been added; but even before that time we may 
well believe that he was, as Mr. Sala says, " one of the few 
men whose individuality was not effaced by the mournful 
conventionality of evening-dress."- Even in morning-dress 
he unconsciously contrived, born actor as he was, to have 
something unusual about him ; and, if report speaks the 
truth, even at the sea-side, when most prodigal of ease, he 
was careful to dress the character. 

The five years of which more especially I am speaking 
brought him repeatedly face to face with the public, and 
within hearing of the applause that was becoming more 
and more of a necessity to him. They were thus unmis- 
takably amongst the very happiest years of his life. The 
shadow that was to fall upon his home can hardly yet 
have been visible even in the dim distance. For this the 
young voices were too many and too fresh around him be- 
hind the garden-wall in Devonshire Terrace, and amongst 
the autumnal corn on the cliffs at Broadstairs. " They 
are all in great force," he writes to his wife, in September, 
1850, and "much excited with the expectation of receiv- 
ing you on Friday ;" and I only wish I had space t* quote 
the special report sent on this occasion to the absent 
mother concerning her precocious three-year-old. What 
sorrowful experiences he in these years underwent wore 



88 DICKENS. [chap. 

such as few men escape amongst the chances of life. In 
1848 he lost the sister who had been the companion of 
his earliest days, and three years later his father, whom he 
had learned to respect as well as love. Not long after- 
wards his little Dora, the youngest of his flock, was sud- 
denly taken from him. Meanwhile, his old friends clung 
to him. Indeed, I never heard that he lost the affection 
of any one who had been attached to him ; and though 
the circle of his real intimates was never greatly wi- 
dened, yet he was on friendly or even familiar terms with 
many whose names belong to the history of their times. 
Amongst these were the late LorcLLytton — then^Sir Ed- 
ward Bulvver Lytton — whose splendid abilities were~itiH 
devoted mainly to literary labours, and between whom and 
Dickens there were more points of contrast than might at 
first sight appear. Of Thackeray, too, he seems to have 
been coming to know more ; and with Leech, more espe- 
cially during a summer sojourn of both their families at 
Bonchurch, in 1849, he grew intimate. Mr. Monckton 
Milnes — then, and since as Lord Houghton, semper amicus, 
semper hospes both to successful merit and to honest en- 
deavour — Lord Carlisle, and others who adorned the great 
world under more than one of its aspects, were, of course, 
welcome friends and acquaintances ; and even Carlyle oc- 
casionally found his way to the house of his staunch ad- 
mirer, though he might declare that he was, in the lan- 
guage of Mr. Peggotty's house-keeper, " a lorn lone creat- 
ure, and everything went contrairy with him." 

It is not very easy to describe the personal habits of a 
man who is found seeing the spring in at Brighton and 
the autumn out at Broadstairs, and in the interval " stroll- 
ing " through the chief towns of the kingdom at the head 
of a large company of ladies and gentlemen, according to 



iv.] "DAVID COPPERFIELD." 89 

the description which he put into Mrs. Gamp's mouth, 
" with a great box of papers under his arm, a-tatking to 
everybody wery indistinct, and exciting of himself dread- 
fid." But since under ordinary circumstances he made, 
even in outward matters and arrangements of detail, a 
home for himself wherever he was, and as a rule cared lit- 
tle for the society of companions whose ideas and ways of 
life were foreign to his own, certain habits had become 
second nature to him, and to others he adhered with so- 
phistical tenacity. He was an early riser, if for no other 
reason, because every man in whose work imagination 
plays its part must sometimes be alone ; and Dickens has 
told us that there was to him something incomparably 
solemn in the still solitude of the morning. But it was 
only exceptionally, and when hard-pressed by the necessi- 
ties of his literary labours, that he wrote before breakfast; 
in general he was contented with the ordinary working 
hours of the morning, not often writing after luncheon, 
and, except in early life, never in the evening. Ordinarily, 
when engaged on a work of fiction, he considered three of 
his not very large MS. pages a good, and four an excellent, 
day's work; and, while very careful in making his correc- 
tions clear and unmistakable, he never rewrote what a 
morning's labour had ultimately produced. On the other 
hand, he was frequently slow in beginning a story, being, 
as he himself says, affected by something like desponden- 
cy at such times, or, as he elsewhere humorously puts it, 
"going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in his* 
cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it." 
A temperate liver, he was at the same time a zealous dev- 
otee of bodily exercise. He had not as yet given up 
riding, and is found, in 1848, spending the whole of a 
March day, with Forster, Leech, and Mark Lemon, in rid- 
G 5 



90 DICKENS. [chap. 

ing over every part of Salisbury Plain. But walking ex- 
ercise was at once his forte and his fanaticism. He is said 
to have constructed for himself a theory that, to every 
portion of the day given to intellectual labour should cor- 
respond an equal number of hours spent in walking ; and 
frequently, no doubt, he gave up his morning's chapter 
before he had begun it, " entirely persuading himself that 
he was under a moral obligation" to do his twenty miles 
on the road. By day he found in the London thorough- 
fares stimulative variety, and at a later date he states it 
to be " one of his fancies that even his idlest walk must 
have its appointed destination ;" and by night, in seasons 
of intellectual excitement, he found in these same streets 
the refreshment of isolation among crowds. But the 
walks he loved best were long stretches on the cliffs or 
across the downs by the sea, where, following the track of 
his " breathers," one half expects to meet him coming 
along against the wind at four and a half miles an hour, 
the very embodiment of energy and brimful of life. 

And besides this energy he carried with him, whereso- 
ever he pitched his tent, what was the second cause of his 
extraordinary success in so much of the business of life as 
it fell to him to perform. He hated disorder as Sir Arte- 
gal hated injustice ; and if there was anything against 
which he took up his parable with burning indignation, it 
was slovenliness, and half-done work, and " shoddiness " of 
all kinds. His love of order made him always the most reg- 
ular of men. "Everything with him," Miss Hogarth told 
me, " went as by clock-work; his movements, his absences 
from home, and the times of his return were all fixed be- 
forehand, and it was seldom that he failed to adhere to 
what he had fixed." Like most men endowed with a 
superfluity of energy, he prided himself on his punctual* 



tv] "DAVID C0PPERF1ELD." 91 

ity. He could not live in a room or in a house till he 
had put every piece of furniture into its proper place, 
nor could he begin to work till all his writing-gear was at 
hand, with no item missing or misplaced. Yet he did not, 
like so many, combine with these habits and tendencies a 
saving disposition. " No man," he said of himself, " at- 
taches less importance to the possession of money, or less 
disparagement to the want of it, than I do." His circum- 
stances, though easy, were never such as to warrant a dis- 
play to which, perhaps, certain qualities of his character 
might have inclined him ; even at a much later date he 
described himself — rather oddly 5 perhaps — as ** a man of 
moderate savings, always supporting a very expensive pub- 
lic position." But, so far as I can gather, he never had 
a reasonable want which he could not and did not satisfy, 
though at the same time he cared for very few of the 
pursuits or amusements that are apt to drain much larger 
resources than his. He never had to think twice about 
country or sea-side quarters ; wherever it might suit his 
purpose or fancy to choose them, at one of his south-coast 
haunts or, for his wife's health, at Malvern, thither he 
went ; and when the whim seized him for a trip en r/arfon 
to any part of England or to Paris, he had only to bid tlie 
infallible Anne pack his trunk. He was a provident as 
well as an affectionate father; but the cost of educating 
his numerous family seems to have caused him no serious 
anxiety. In 1849 he sent his eldest son to Eton. And 
while he had sworn a kind of vendetta against begging-let- 
ter writers, and afterwards used to parry the attacks of his 
pertinacious enemies by means of carefully-prepared writ- 
ten forms, his hand seems to have been at all times open 
for charity. 

Some of these personal characteristics of Dickens were 



92 DICKENS. [chap. 

to be brought out with remarkable vividness during the 
period of his life which forms the special subject of the 
present chapter. Never was he more thoroughly himself 
than as a theatrical manager and actor, surrounded by 
congenial associates. lie starred it to his heart's content 
at the country seat of his kind Lausanne friends, Mr. and 
Mrs. Watson. But the first occasion on which he became 
publicly known in both the above-mentioned capacities 
was the reproduction of the amateur performance of Every 
Man in his Humour. This time the audiences were to 
be in Manchester and Liverpool, where it was hoped that 
a golden harvest might be reaped for Leigh Hunt, who 
was at that time in sore straits. As it chanced, a civil- 
list pension was just about this time — 1847 — conferred 
upon the most unaffectedly graceful of all modern writers 
of English verse. It was accordingly resolved to divert 
part of the proceeds of the undertaking in favour of a 
worthy playwright, the author of Paul Pry. The com- 
edy was acted with brilliant success at Manchester, on July 
26, and at Liverpool two days later; and then the "man- 
agerial miseries," which Dickens had enjoyed with his 
whole heart and soul, were over for the nonce. Already, 
however, in the following year, 1848, an excellent reason 
was found for their recommencement ; and nine perform- 
ances of Ben Jonson's play, this time alternated with 
The Merry Wives of Windsor, were given by Dickens's 
"company of amateurs" — the expression is his own — at 
the Haymarket, and in the theatres of five of the largest 
towns in the kingdom, for the benefit of Sheridan Knovvles. 
Nothing could have been more honourable than Dickens's 
readiness to serve the interests of an actor with whom, but 
for his own generous temper, he would only a few months 
before have been involved in a wordy quarrel. In The 



iv.] "DAVID COPPERFIELD." 93 

Merry Wives, the manager acted Justice Shallow to Mark 
Lemon's Falstaff. Dame Quickly was played by Mrs. 
Cowden Clarke, who speedily became a favourite corre- 
spondent of Dickens. But the climax of these excite- 
ments arrived in the year of wonders, 1851, when, with a 
flourish of trumpets resounding through the world of 
fashion as well as of letters, the comedy Not so Bad as 
We Seem, written for the occasion by Bulvver Lytton, was 
performed under Dickens's management at Devonshire 
House, in the presence of the Queen, for the benefit of 
the Guild of Literature and Art. The object was a noble 
one, though the ultimate result of the scheme has been an 
almost pitiable failure; and nothing was spared, by the 
host or the actors, to make the effect worthy of it. While 
some of the most popular men of letters took parts in the 
clever and effective play, its scenery was painted by some 
of the most eminent among the English artists. Dickens 
was fired by the ardour of the enterprise, and, proceeding 
on his principle that the performance could not possibly 
" be a success if the smallest pepper-corn of arrangement 
were omitted," covered himself and his associates with 
glory. From Devonshire House play and theatre were 
transferred to the Hanover Square Rooms, where the 
farce of Mr. Nightingale 's Diary was included in the per- 
formance, of which some vivid reminiscences have been 
published by one of the few survivors of that noble com- 
pany, Mr. R. H. Home. Other accounts corroborate his 
recollections of the farce, which was the triumph of " gag," 
and would have been reckoned a masterpiece in the old 
com media delV arte. The characters played by Dickens 
included Sam Weller turned waiter; a voluble barrister 
by the name of Mr. Gabblcwig ; a hypochondriac suffering 
from a prescription of mustard and milk ; the Gampish 



94 DICKENS. [chap. 

mother of a charity - boy (Mr. Egg) ; and her brother, a 
stone-deaf old sexton, who appeared to be " at least ninety 
years of age." The last-named assumption seems to have 
been singularly effective: 

"After repeated shoutings ('It's of no use whispering to me, young 
man') of the word 'buried' — 'Brewed! Oh yes, sir, I have brewed 
many a good gallon of ale in my time. The last batch I brewed, sir, 
was finer than all the rest — the best ale ever brewed in the county. 
It used to be called in our parts here " Samson with his hair on !" 
in allusion' — here his excitement shook the tremulous frame into 
coughing and wheezing — ' in allusion to its great strength.' He look- 
ed from face to face to see if his feat was duly appreciated, and his 
venerable jest understood by those around ; and then, softly repeat- 
ing, with a glimmering smile, ' in allusion to its great strength,' he 
turned about, and made his exit, like one moving towards his own 
grave while he thinks he is following the funeral of another." 

From London the company travelled into the country, 
where their series of performances was not closed till late 
in the succeeding year, 1852. Dickens was from first to 
last the manager, and the ruling spirit of the undertaking. 
Amongst his latest recruits Mr. Wilkie Collinses specially 
mentioned by Forstcr. The acquaintance which thus be- 
gan soon ripened into a close and lasting friendship, and 
became, with the exception of that with Forster himself, 
the most important of all Dickens's personal intimacies 
for the history of his career as an author. 

Speech-making was not in quite the same sense, or to 
quite the same degree, as amateur acting and managing, a 
voluntary labour on Dickens's part. Not that he was one 
of those to whom the task of occasionally addressing a 
public audience is a pain or even a burden. Indeed, he 
was a born orator; for he possessed both that strong and 
elastic imaginative power which enables a man to place 



tr.] "DAVID COPPERFIELD." 95 

himself at once in sympathy with his audience, and that 
gift of speech, pointed, playful, and where necessary im- 
petuous, which pleads well in any assembly for any cause. 
He had moreover the personal qualifications of a hand- 
some manly presence, a sympathetic eye, and a fine flexible 
voice, which, as his own hints on public speaking show, 
he managed with care and intelligence. He had, he says, 
" fought with beasts (oratorically) in divers arenas." But 
though a speaker in whom ease bred force, and force ease, 
he was the reverse of a mere builder of phrases and 
weaver of periods. " Mere holding forth," he declared, 
" I utterly detest, abominate, and abjure." His innate 
hatred of talk for mere talk's sake had doubtless been 
intensified by his early repo^^ng experiences, and by what 
had become his stereotyped notion of our parliamentary 
system. At the Administration Reform meeting in 1855 
he stated that he had never before attended a public meet- 
ing. On the other hand, he had been for already several 
years in great request for meetings of a different kind, 
concerned with the establishment or advancement of edu- 
cational or charitable institutions in London and other 
great towns of the country. His addresses from the chair 
were often of remarkable excellence ; and this not merely 
because crowded halls and increased subscription-lists were 
their concomitants, and because the happiness of his hu- 
mour — never out of season, and even on such occasions 
often singularly prompt — sent every one home in good 
spirits. In these now forgotten speeches on behalf of 
Athenujums and Mechanics' Institutes, or of actors' and 
artists' and newsmen's charities, their occasional advocate 
never appears occasional. Instead of seeming to have 
just mastered his brief while the audience was taking its 
seats, or to have become for the first time deeply inter- 



96 DICKENS. [chap. 

ested in his subject in the interval between his soup and 
his speech, the cause which Dickens pleads never has in 
him either an imperfectly informed or a half-indifferent 
representative. Amongst many charming illustrations of a 
vein of oratory in which he has been equalled by very few 
if by any public men of his own or the succeeding genera- 
tion, I will instance only one address, though it belongs 
to a considerably later date than the time of David Cop- 
perficld. Nothing, however, that Dickens has ever writ- 
ten — not even David Copperfield itself — breathes a ten- 
derer sympathy for the weakness of unprotected child- 
hood than the beautiful little speech delivered by him on 
February 9, 1858, oh behalf of the London Hospital for 
Sick Children. Beginning with some touches of humour 
concerning the spoilt children of the rich, the orator goes 
on to speak of the " spoilt children " of the poor, illustrat- 
ing with concrete directness both the humorous and the 
pathetic side of his subject, and after a skilfully introduced 
sketch of the capabilities and wants of the " infant institu- 
tion " for which he pleads, ending with an appeal, found- 
ed on a fancy of Charles Lamb, to the support of the 
"dream-children" belonging to each of his hearers: "the 
dear child you love, the dearer child yon have lost, the 
child you might have had, the child you certainly have 
been." This is true eloquence, of a kind which aims at 
something besides opening purse-strings. In 1851 he had 
spoken in the same vein of mixed humour and pathos 
on behalf of his clients, the poor actors, when, unknown 
'to him, a little child of his own was lying dead at 
home. But in these years of his life, as indeed at all 
times, his voice was at the service of such causes as had 
his sympathy ; it was heard at Birmingham, at Leeds, 
at Glasgow ; distance was of little moment to his ener- 



rv.] "DAVID COPFERFIELD." 97 

getic nature ; and as to trouble, how could he do any- 
thing by halves? 

There was yet a third kind of activity, distinct from 
that of literary work pure and simple, in which Dickens 
in these years for the first time systematically engaged. 
It has been seen how he had long cherished the notion of 
a periodical conducted by himself, and marked by a unity 
of design which should make it in a more than ordinary 
sense his own paper. With a genius like his, which at- 
tached itself to the concrete, very much depended at the 
outset upon the choice of a title. The Cricket could not 
serve again, and for some time the notion of an omnipres- 
ent Shadow, with something, if possible, tacked to it "ex- 
pressing the notion of its being cheerful, useful, and al- 
ways welcome," seemed to promise excellently. For a 
rather less ambitious design, however, a rather less ambi- 
tious title was sought, and at last fortunately found, in the 
phrase, rendered proverbial by Shakspeare, " Household 

Words." " We hope," he wrote a few weeks before the 
first number appeared, on March 30, 1850, "to do some 
solid good, and we mean to be as cheery and pleasant as 
we can." But Household Words, which in form and in 
cost was to be a paper for the multitude, was to be some- 
thing more than agreeable and useful and cheap. It was 
to help in casting out the many devils that had taken up 
their abode in popular periodical literature, the " bastards 
of the Mountain," and the foul fiends who dealt in infa- 
mous scurrility, and to do this with the aid of a charm 
more potent than the most lucid argument and the most 
abundant facts. " In the bosoms of the young and old, 
«>f the well-to-do and of the poor," says the Preliminary 

Word in the first number, " we would tenderly cherish 
that light of fancy which is inherent in the human 
5* 



98 DICKENS. [chap. 

breast." To this purpose it was the editor's constant and 
deliberate endeavour to bind his paper. " Keep ' House- 
hold Words' imaginative!" is the "solemn and con- 
tinual Conductorial Injunction" which three years after 
the foundation of the journal he impresses, with the artful 
aid of capitals, upon his faithful coadjutor, Mr. W. H. 
Wills. In his own contributions he was not forgetful of 
this maxim, and the most important of them, the serial 
story, Hard Times, was written with the express intention 
of pointing it as a moral. 

There are, I suppose, in addition to the many mysterious 
functions performed by the editor of a literary journal, 
two of the very highest significance ; in the first place, the 
choice of his contributors, and then, if the expression may 
be used, the management of them. In both respects but 
one opinion seems to exist of Dickens's admirable qualities 
as an editor. Out of the many contributors to Household 
Words, and its kindred successor, All the Year Round — 
some of whom are happily still among living writers — it 
would be invidious to select for mention a few in proof of 
the editor's discrimination. But it will not be forgotten 
that the first number of the earlier journal contained the 
beginning of a tale by Mrs. Gaskell, whose name will long 
remain a household word in England, both North and 
South. And a periodical could hardly be deemed one- 
sided which included among its contributors scholars and 
writers of the distinction belonging to the names of Forster 
and Mr. Henry Morley, together with humorous observers 
of men and things such as Mr. Sala and Albert Smith. On 
the other hand, Household Words had what every literary 
journal ought to have, an individuality of its own ; and 
this individuality was, of course, that of its editor. The 
mannerisms of Dickens's style afterwards came to be ini- 



it.] "DAVID COPPERFIELD." 99 

itated by some among his contributors; but the general 
unity perceptible in the journal was the natural and legiti- 
mate result of the fact that it stood under the independent 
control of a vigorous editor, assisted by a sub-editor — Mr. 
W. H. Wills — of rare trustworthiness. Dickens had a keen 
eye for selecting subjects from a definite field, a ready skill 
for shaping, if necessary, the articles accepted by him, and 
a genius for providing them with expressive and attractive 
titles. Fiction and poetry apart, these articles have mostly 
a social character or bearing, although they often deviate 
into the pleasant paths of literature or art; and usually, 
but by no means always, the- scenes or associations with 
which they connect themselves are of England, English. 

Nothing could surpass the unflagging courtesy shown 
by Dickens towards his contributors, great or small, old or 
new, and his patient interest in their endeavours, while he 
conducted Household Words, and afterwards All the Year 
Round. Of this there is evidence enough to make the 
records of the office in Wellington Street a pleasant page 
in the history of journalism. He valued a good workman 
when he found him, and was far too reasonable and gener- 
ous to put his own stamp upon all the good metal that 
passed through his hands. Even in his Christmas Num- 
bers he left the utmost possible freedom to his associates. 
Where he altered or modified it was as one who had come 
to know the pulse of the public ; and he was not less con- 
siderate with novices, than he was frank and explicit with 
experts, in the writer's art. The articles in his journal be- 
ing anonymous, he was not tempted to use names as baits 
for the public, though many who wrote for him were men 
or women of high literary reputation. And he kept his 
doors open. While some editors deem it their duty to 
ward off would-be contributors, as some ministers of state 



100 DICKENS. [chap. 

think it theirs to get rid of deputations, Dickens sought to 
ignore instead of jealously guarding the boundaries of pro- 
fessional literature. Nothing in this way ever gave him 
greater delight than to have welcomed and published sev- 
eral poems sent to him under a feigned name, but which 
he afterwards discovered to be the first-fruits of the charm- 
ing poetical talent of Miss Adelaide Procter, the daughter 
of his old friend "Barry Cornwall." 

In the preparation of his own papers, or of those which, 
like the Christmas Numbers, he composed conjointly with 
one or more of his familiars, he spared no labour and 
thought no toil too great. At times, of course, he, like all 
periodical writers who cannot be merry every Wednesday 
or caustic every Saturday, felt the pressure of the screw. 
"As to two comic articles," he exclaims on one occasion, 
" or two any sort of articles, out of me, that's the intensest 
extreme of no-goism." But, as a rule, no great writer ever 
ran more gaily under his self-imposed yoke. His " Un- 
commercial Travels," as he at a later date happily chris- 
tened them, familiarised him with whatever parts or aspects 
of London his long walks had still left unexplored; and 
he was as conscientious in hunting up the details of a com- 
plicated subject as in finding out the secrets of an obscure 
pursuit or trade. Accomplished antiquarians and "com- 
missioners" assisted him in his labours; but he was no roi 
faineant on the editorial sofa which he so complacently 
describes. Whether he was taking A Walk in a Work- 
house, or knocking at the door of another with the super- 
numerary waifs in Whitechapel, or On (night) Duty with 
Inspector Field among the worst of the London slums, he 
was always ready to see with his own eyes; after which 
the photographic power of his pen seemed always capable 
of doing the rest. Occasionally he treats topics more 



iv.] "DAVID COPPERFIELD." 101 

properly journalistic, but lie is most delightful when he 
takes his ease in his English or his French Watering- 
place, or carries his readers with him on A Flight to 
Paris, bringing before them, as it were, in breathless suc- 
cession, every inch of the familiar journey. Happiest of 
all is he when, with his friend Mr. Wilkie Collins — this, 
however, not until the autumn of 1857 — he starts on The 
Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, the earlier chapters 
of which furnish some of the best specimens of his most 
humorous prose. Neither at the same time does he forget 
himself to enforce the claim of his journal to strengthen 
the imaginary side of literature. In an assumed character 
he allows a veteran poet to carry him By Rail to Par- 
nassus, and even good-humouretlly banters an old friend, 
George Cruikshank, for having committed Frauds on the 
Fairies by re-editing legendary lore with the view of in- 
culcating the principle of total abstinence. 

Such, then, were some of the channels in which the in- 
tense mental and physical energy of Dickens found a con- 
genial outlet in these busy years. Yet in the very midst 
of this multifarious activity the mysterious and controlling 
power of his genius enabled him to collect himself for the 
composition of a work of fiction which, as I have already 
said, holds, and will always continue to hold, a place of its 
own among its works. "Of all my books," he declares, 
" I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am 
a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one 
can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, 
like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a 
favourite child — and his name is David Copperfield !" 
He parted from the story with a pang, and when in after 
life he returned to its perusal, he was hardly able to 
master the emotions which it recalled ; perhaps even he 



102 DICKENS. [chap. 

hardly knew what the effort of its production had cost 
him. 

The first number of David Copperfield was published 
in May, 1849 — the last in November, 1850. To judge 
from the difficulty which Dickens found in choosing a 
title for his story — of which difficulty plentiful evidence 
remains in MS. at South Kensington — he must have been 
fain to delay longer even than usual on the threshold. 
In the end the name of the hero evolved itself out of a 
series of transformations, from Trotfield and Trotbury to 
Copperboy, Copperstone — "Copperfull" being reserved 
as a lectio varians for Mrs. Crupp — and Copperfield. 
Then at last the pen could fall seriously to work, and, 
proceeding slowly at first — for the first page of the MS. 
contains a great number of alterations — dip itself now 
into black, now into blue ink, and in a small writing, al- 
ready contrasting with the bolder hand of earlier days, 
produce page upon page of an incomparable book. No 
doubt what so irresistibly attracted Dickens to David Cop- 
perfield, and what has since fascinated many readers, more 
or less conscious of the secret of the charm, is the auto- 
biographical element in the story. Until the publication 
of Forster's Life no reader of Copperfield could be aware 
of the pang it must have cost Dickens to lay bare, though 
to unsuspecting eyes, the story of -experiences which he 
had hitherto kept all but absolutely secret, and to which 
his own mind could not recur without a quivering sensi- 
tiveness. No reader could trace, as the memory of Dick- 
ens always must have traced, some of the most vivid of 
those experiences, imbued though they were with the 
tints of a delightfully playful humor, in the doings and 
dealings of Mr. Wilkins Micawber, whose original, by a 
strange coincidence, was passing tranquilly away out of 



iv.] "DAVID COPPERFIELD." 103 

life, while his comic counterpart was blossoming into a 
whimsical immortality. And no reader could divine, 
what very probably even the author may hardly have vent- 
ured to confess to himself, that in the lovely little idyl 
of the loves of Doady and Dora — with Jip, as Dora's fa- 
ther might have said, intervening — there were, besides the 
reminiscences of an innocent juvenile amour, the vestiges 
of a man's unconfessed though not altogether unrepressed 
disappointment — the sense that " there was always some- 
thing wanting." But in order to be affected by a person- 
al or autobiographical element in a fiction or poem, it is 
by no means necessary to be aware of its actual bearing 
and character, or even of its very existence. Amelia 
would gain little by illustrative notes concerning the ex- 
periences of the first Mrs. Fielding. To excite in a work 
of fiction the peculiar kind of interest of which I am 
speaking the existence of an autobiographical substratum 
need not be apparent in it, nor need its presence be even 
suspected. Enough, if it be there. But it had far better 
be away altogether, unless the novelist has so thoroughly 
fused this particular stream of metal with the mass filling 
his mould that the result is an integral artistic whole. 
Such was, however, the case with David Copperjield, which 
of all Dickens's fictions is on the whole the most perfect 
as a work of art. Personal reminiscences which lay deep 
in the author's breast are, as effects, harmonised with local 
associations old and new. Thus, Yarmouth, painted in 
the story with singular poetic truthfulness, had only quite 
recently been seen by Dickens for the first time, on a 
holiday trip. His imagination still subdued to itself 
all the elements with which he worked ; and, whatever 
may be thought of the construction of this story, none 
of his other books equals it in that harmony of tone 



104 DICKENS. [chap. 

which no artist can secure unless by recasting all his ma- 
terials. 

As to the construction of David Coppcrfield, however, 
I frankly confess that I perceive no serious fault in it. 
It is a story with a plot, and not merely a string of advent- 
ures and experiences, like little Davy's old favourites up- 
stairs at Blunderstone. In the conduct of this plot blem- 
ishes may here and there occur. The boy's flight from 
London, and the direction which it takes, are insufficiently 
accounted for. A certain amount of obscurity, as well 
perhaps as of improbability, pervades the relations between 
Uriah and the victim, round whom the unspeakably slimy 
thing writhes and wriggles. On the other hand, the mere 
conduct of the story has much that is beautiful in it. 
Thus, there is real art in the way in which the scene of 
Barkis's death — written with admirable moderation — pre- 
pares for the "greater loss" at hand for the mourning 
family. And in the entire treatment of his hero's double 
love story Dickens has, to my mind, avoided that discord 
which, in spite of himself, jars upon the reader both in 
Esmond and in Adam Bede. The best constructed part 
of David Copperfield is, however, unmistakably the story 
of Little Emily and her kinsfolk. This is most skilfully 
interwoven with the personal experiences of David, of 
which — except in its very beginnings — it forms no integral 
part ; and throughout the reader is haunted by a presenti- 
ment of the coming catastrophe, though unable to divine 
the tragic force and justice of its actual accomplishment. 
A touch altered here and there in Steerforth, with the 
Rosa Dartle episode excluded or greatly reduced, and this 
part of David Copperfield might challenge comparison as 
to workmanship with the whole literature of modern 
fiction. 



iv.] "DAVID COPPERFIELD." 105 

Of the idyl of Davy and Dora what shall I say? Its 
earliest stages are full of the gayest comedy. What, for 
instance, could surpass the history of the picnic — where 
was it \ perhaps it was near Guildford. At that feast an 
imaginary rival, "Red Whisker," made the salad — how 
could they eat it ? — and " voted himself into the charge 
of the wine-cellar, which he constructed, being an ingenious 
beast, in the hollow trunk of a tree." Better still are the 
backward ripples in the course of true love ; best of all 
the deep wisdom of Miss Mills, in whose nature mental 
trial and suffering supplied, in some measure, the place 
of years. In the narrative of the young house-keeping 
David's real trouble is most skilfully mingled with the 
comic woes of the situation ; and thus the idyl almost im- 
perceptibly passes into the last phase, where the clouds 
dissolve in a rain of tears. The genius which conceived 
and executed these closing scenes was touched by a pity 
towards the fictitious creatures of his own imagination, 
which melted his own heart ; and thus his pathos is here 
irresistible. 

The inventive power of Dickens in none of his other 
books indulged itself so abundautly in the creation of ec- 
centric characters, but neither was it in any so admirably 
tempered by taste and feeling. It contains no character 
which could strictly be called grotesque, unless it be little 
Miss Mowcher. Most of her outward peculiarities Dick- 
ens had copied from a living original ; but receiving a re- 
monstrance from the latter, he good-humouredly altered 
the use he had intended to make of the character, and 
thereby spoiled what there was in it — not much, in my 
opinion — to spoil. Mr. Dick belongs to a species of 
eccentric personages — mad people, in a word — for which 

Dickens as a writer had a curious liking; but though 
H 



106 DICKENS. [chap. 

there is consequently no true humour in this character, 
it helps to bring out the latent tenderness in another. 
David's Aunt is a figure which none but a true humourist 
such as Sterne or Dickens could have drawn, and she 
must have sprung from the author's brain armed cap-a-pie 
as she appeared in her garden before his little double. 
Yet even Miss Betsey Trotwood was not altogether a crea- 
tion of the fancy, for at Broadstairs the locality is still 
pointed out where the "one great outrage of her life" 
was daily renewed. In the other chief characters of this 
story the author seems to rely entirely on natural truthful- 
ness. He must have had many opportunities of noting the 
ways of seamen and fishermen, but the occupants of the old 
boat near Yarmouth possess the typical characteristics with 
which the experience and the imagination of centuries have 
agreed to credit the " salt " f division of mankind. Again, 
he had had his own experience of shabby-genteel life, and 
of the struggle which he had himself seen a happy and a 
buoyant temperament maintaining against a sea of trouble. 
But Mr. Micawber, whatever features may have been trans- 
ferred to him, is the type of a whole race of men who 
will not vanish from the face of the earth so long as the 
hope which lives eternal in the human breast is only tem- 
porarily suspended by the laws of debtor and creditor, and 
is always capable of revival with the aid of a bowl of milk- 
punch. A kindlier and a merrier, a more humorous and 
a more genuine character was never conceived than this ; 
and if anything was wanted to complete the comicality of 
the conception, it was the wife of his bosom with the 
twins at her own, and her mind made up not to desert Mr. 
Micawber. Delightful too in his way, though of a class 
more common in Dickens, is Tommy Traddles, the genial 
picture of whose married life in chambers in Gray's Inn, 



iv.] "DAVID CUPPERFIELD." 107 

with the dearest girl in the world and her five sisters, in- 
cluding - the beauty, on a visit, may have been suggested 
by kindly personal reminiscences of youthful days. In 
contrast to these characters, the shambling, fawning, vil- 
lanous hypocrisy of Uriah Heep is a piece of intense and 
elaborate workmanship, almost cruelly done without being 
overdone. It was in his figures of hypocrites that Dick- 
ens's satirical power most diversely displayed itself ; and 
by the side of Uriah Heep in this story, literally so in the 
prison-scene at the close, stands another species of the race, 
the valet Littimer, a sketch which Thackeray himself cou'd 
not have surpassed. 

Thus, then, I must leave the book, with its wealth of 
pathos and humour, with the glow of youth still tinging 
its pages, but with the gentler mood of manhood pervading 
it from first to last. The reality of David Copperfidd is, 
perhaps, the first feature in it likely to strike the reader 
new to its charms; but a closer acquaintance will produce, 
and familiarity will enhance, the sense of its wonderful 
art. Nothing will ever destroy the popularity of a work 
of which it can truly be said that, while offering to his 
muse a gift not less beautiful than precious, its author 
put into it his life's blood. 

\ 



CHAPTER V. 

CHANGES. 

[1852-1858.] 

i have spoken of both the intellectual and the physical 
vigour of Charles Dickens as at their height in the years 
of which the most enduring fruit was the most delightful 
of all his fictions. But there was no break in his activity 
after the achievement of this or any other of his literary 
successes, and he was never harder at work than during 
the seven years of which I am about to speak, although 
in this period also occasionally he was to be found hard 
at play. Its beginning saw him settled in his new and 
cheerfully-furnished abode at Tavistock House, of which 
he had taken possession in October, 1851. At its close 
he was master of the country residence which had been 
the dream of his childhood, but he had become a stranger 
to that tranquillity of mind without which no man's 
house is truly his home. Gradually, but surely, things 
had then, or a little before, come to such a pass that he 
wrote to his faithful friend : " I am become incapable of 
rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, 
if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I 
am in that way Nature made me first, and my way of life 
has of late, alas! confirmed." Early in 1852 the young- 
est of his children had been born to him — the boy whose 



chap, v.] CHANGES. 109 

babyhood once more revived in him a tenderness the depth 
of which no eccentric humours and fantastic sobriquets 
could conceal. In May, 1858, he had separated from the 
mother of his children ; and though self-sacrificing affec- 
tion was at hand to watch over them and him, yet that 
domestic life of which he had become the prophet and 
poet to hundreds of thousands was in its fairest and full- 
est form at an end for himself. 

In the earlier of these years Dickens's movements were 
still very much of the same kind, and varied much after 
the same fashion, as in the period described in my last 
chapter. In 1852 the series of amateur performances in 
the country was completed; but time was found for a 
summer residence in Camden Crescent, Dover. During 
his stay there, and during most of his working hours in 
this and the following year — the spring of which was part- 
ly spent at Brighton — he was engaged upon his new story, 
Bleak House, published in numbers dating from March, 
1852, to September, 1853. "To let you into a secret," he 
had written to his lively friend, Miss Mary Boyle, from 
Dover, " I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever 
shall like, anything quite so well as Copperjield. But I 
foresee, I think, some very good things in Bleak House." 
There is no reason to believe that, by the general public, 
this novel was at the time of its publication a whit less fa- 
vourably judged or less eagerly read than its predecessor. 
According to the author's own testimony it " took extraor- 
dinarily, especially during .the last five or six months " of 
its issue, and " retained its immense circulation from the 
first, beating dear old Coppcrfield by a round ten thousand 
or more." To this day the book has its staunch friends, 
some of whom would perhaps be slow to confess by which 
of the elements in the story they are most forcibly attract- 



110 DICKENS. [chap. 

od. On the other hand, Bleak House was probably the 
first of Dickens's works which furnished a suitable text to 
a class of censors whose precious balms have since de- 
scended upon his head with constant reiteration. The 
power of amusing - being graciously conceded to the "man 
of genius," his hook was charged with " absolute want of 
construction," and with being a heterogeneous compound 
made up of a meagre and melodramatic story, and a num- 
ber of " odd folks that have to do with a long Chancery 
suit." Of the characters themselves it was asserted that, 
though in the main excessively funny, they were more like 
caricatures of the stage than studies from nature. Some 
approval was bestowed upon particular figures, but rather 
as types of the influence of externals than as real individ- 
ualities ; and while the character of the poor crossing- 
sweeper was generously praised, it was regretted that Dick- 
ens should never have succeeded in drawing "a man or 
woman whose lot is cast among the high-born or wealthy." 
He belonged, unfortunately, " in literature to the same class 
as his illustrator, Hablot Browne, in design, though he far 
surpasses the illustrator in range and power." In other 
words, he was essentially a caricaturist. 

As applied to Bleak House, with which I am at present 
alone concerned, this kind of censure was in more ways 
than one unjust. So far as constructive skill was con- 
cerned, the praise given by Forster to Bleak House may 
be considered excessive ; but there can be no doubt that, 
as compared, not with Pickwick and Nickleby, but with its 
immediate predecessor, David Copjier field, this novel ex- 
hibits a decided advance in that respect. In truth, Dickens 
in Bleak House for the first time emancipated himself 
from that form of novel which, in accordance with his 
great eighteenth-century favourites, he had hitherto more 



v.] CHANGES. Ill 

or less consciously adopted — the novel of adventure, of 
which the person of the hero, rather than the machinery 
of the plot, forms the connecting element. It may be that 
the influence of Mr. Wilkie Collins was already strong upon 
him, and that the younger writer, whom Dickens was about 
this time praising for his unlikcness to the "conceited idi- 
ots who suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pan- 
cakes," was already teaching something to, as well as learn- 
ing something from, the elder. It may also be that the 
criticism which as editor of Household Words Dickens was 
now in the habit of judiciously applying to the fictions of 
others, unconsciously affected his own methods and proc- 
esses. Certain it is that from this point of view Bleak 
House may be said to begin a new series among his works 
of fiction. The great Chancery suit and the fortunes of 
those concerned in it are not a disconnected background 
from which the mystery of Lady Dedlock's secret stands 
forth in relief; but the two main parts of the story are 
skilfully interwoven as in a Spanish double-plot. Nor is 
the success of the general action materially affected by the 
circumstance that the tone of Esther Summerson's diary 
is not altogether true. At the same time there is indis- 
putably some uncvenness in the construction of Bleak 
House. It drags, and drags very perceptibly, in some of 
its earlier parts. On the other hand, the interest of the 
reader is strongly revived when that popular favourite, 
Mr. Inspector Bucket, appears on the scene, and when, 
more especially in the admirably vivid narrative of Esther's 
journey with the detective, the nearness of the catastrophe 
exercises its exciting influence. Some of the machinery, 
moreover — such as the Smallweed family's part in the plot 
— is tiresome ; and particular incidents are intolerably hor- 
rible or absurd — such as on the one hand the spontaneous 



112 DICKENS. [chap. 

combustion (which is proved possible by the analogy of 
historical facts !), and on the other the intrusion of the oil- 
grinding Mr. Chadband into the solemn presence of Sir 
Leicester Dedlock's grief. But in general the parts of the 
narrative are well knit together; and there is a subtle skill 
in the way in which the two main parts of the story con- 
verge towards their common close. 

The idea of making an impersonal object like a great 
Chancery suit the centre round which a large and mani- 
fold group of characters revolves, seems to savour of a 
drama rather than of a story. No doubt the theme sug- 
gested itself to Dickens with a very real purpose, and on 
the basis of facts which he might well think warranted 
him in his treatment of it; for, true artist though he was, 
the thought of exposing some national defect, of helping to 
bring about some real reform, was always paramount in his 
mind over any mere literary conception. Prima facie, at 
least, and with all due deference to Chancery judges and 
eminent silk gowns like Mr. Blowers, the length of Chan- 
cery suits was a real public grievance, as well as a frequent 
private calamity. But even as a mere artistic notion the 
idea of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce as diversely affecting those 
who iived by it, those who rebelled against it, those who 
died of it, was, in its way, of unique furce ; and while 
Dickens never brought to any other of his subjects so use- 
ful a knowledge of its external details — in times gone by 
he had served a " Kenge and Carboys " of his own — 
hardly any one of those subjects suggested so wide a 
variety of aspects for characteristic treatment. 

For never before had his versatility in drawing character 
filled his canvas with so multitudinous and so various a 
host of personages. The legal profession, with its ser- 
vitors and hangers-on of every degree, occupies the centre 



v.] CHANGES. IIS 

of the picture. In this group no figure is more deserving 
of admiration than that of Mr. Tulkinghorn, the eminently 
respectable family solicitor, at whose very funeral, by a 
four-wheeled affliction, the good-will of the aristocracy 
manifests itself. We learn very little about him, and 
probably care less; but he interests us precisely as we 
should be interested by the real old family lawyer, about 
whom we might know and care equally little, were we to. 
hud him alone in the twilight, drinking his ancient port in 
his frescoed chamber in those fields where the shepherds 
play on Chancery pipes that have no stop. (Mr. Forster, 
by-thc-way, omitted to point out to his readers, what the 
piety of American research has since put on record, that 
Mr. Tulkinghbrn's house was a picture of the biographer's 
own residence.) The portrait of Mr. Vholes, who supports 
an unassailable but unenviable professional reputation for 
the sake of " the three dear girls at home," and a father 
whom he has to support " in the Vale of Taunton," is less 
attractive; but nothing could be more in its place in the 
story than the clammy tenacity of this legal ghoul and his 
" dead glove." Lower down in the great system of the 
law we come upon Mr. Guppy and his fellows, the very 
quintessence of cockney vulgarity, seasoned with a flavour 
of legal sharpness without which the rankness of the mixt- 
ure would be incomplete. To the legal group Miss Flite, 
whose original, if I remember right, used to haunt the 
Temple as well as the precincts of the Chancery courts, 
may likewise be said to belong. She is quite legitimately 
introduced into the story — which cannot be said of all 
Dickens's madmen — because her madness associates itself 
with its main theme. 

Much admiration has been bestowed upon the figures of 
an eccentric b£'or under plot in this story, in which the 
6 



1 14 DICKENS. [chap. 

family of the Jolly bys and the august Mr. Turveydrop are, 
actively, or by passive endurance, engaged. The philan- 
thropic section of le monde ok Von s'ennuie has never been 
satirised more tellingly, and, it must be added, more bit- 
terly. Perhaps at the time of the publication of Bleak 
House the activity of our Mrs. Jellybys took a wider and 
more cosmopolitan sweep than in later days; for we read 
at the end of Esther's diary how Mrs. Jellyby " has been 
disappointed in Borrioboola Gha, which turned out a fail- 
ure in consequence of the King of Borrioboola wanting to 
sell everybody — who survived the climate — for rum ; but 
she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Par- 
liament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more 
correspondence than the old one." But Mrs. Jellyby's in- 
terference in the affairs of other people is after all hurt- 
ful only because in busying herself with theirs she forgets 
her own. The truly offensive benefactress of her fellow- 
creatures is Mrs. Pardiggle, who, maxim in mouth and 
tract in hand, turns everything she approaches to stone. 
Among her victims are her own children, including Al- 
fred, aged five, who has been induced to take an oath 
" never to use tobacco in any form." 

The particular vein of feeling that led Dickens to the 
delineation of these satirical figures was one which never 
ran dry with liim, and which suggested some forcible- 
feeble satire in his very last fiction. I call it a vein of 
feeling only ; for he could hardly have argued in cold 
blood that the efforts which he ridicules were not misrep- 
resented as a whole by his satire. When poor Jo on his 
death-bed is "asked whether he ever knew a prayer," and 
replies that he could never make anything out of those 
spoken by the gentlemen who "came down Tom-all- Alonc's 
a-prayin 1 ," but who " mostly sed as the t'other wuns prayed 



v.] CHANGES. US 

wrong," the author brings a charge which he might not 
have found it easy to substantiate. Yet — with the excep- 
tion of such isolated passages — the figure of Jo is in truth 
one of the most powerful protests that have been put for- 
ward on behalf of the friendless outcasts of our streets. 
Nor did the romantic element in the conception interfere 
with the effect of the realistic. If Jo, who seems at first 
to have been intended to be one of the main figures of the 
story, is in Dickens's best pathetic manner, the Bagnct 
family is in his happiest vein of quiet humour. Mr. In- 
spector Bucket, though not altogether free from manner- 
ism, well deserves the popularity which he obtained. For 
this character, as the pages of Household Words testify, 
Dickens had made many studies in real life. The detec- 
tive police-officer had at that time not yet become a stand- 
ing figure of fiction and the drama, nor had the detective 
of real life begun to destroy the illusion. 

Bleak House was least of all among the novels hitherto 
published by its author obnoxious to the charge persistent- 
ly brought against him, that he was doomed to failure in 
his attempts to draw characters taken from any but the 
lower spheres of life — in his attempts, in short, to draw 
ladies and gentlemen. To begin with, one of tlie most 
interesting characters in the book — indeed, in its relation 
to the main idea of the story, the most interesting of all — 
is the youthful hero, if he is to be so called, Richard Car- 
son. From the very nature of the conception the charac- 
ter is passive only; but the'Nart and feeling are in their 
way unsurpassed with which the gradual collapse of a fine 
nature is here exhibited. Sir Leicester Dcdlock, in some 
measure intended as a type of his class, has been con- 
demned as wooden and unnatural ; and no doubt the 
machinery of that part of the story in which he is con- 



116 DICKEXS. [chap. 

corned creaks before it gets under way. On the other 
hand, after the catastrophe has overwhelmed him and his 
house, he becomes a really fine picture, unmarred by any 
Grandisonianisms in either thought or phrase, of a true 
gentleman, bowed but not warped by distress. Sir Leices- 
ter's relatives, both dead and living; Volumnia's sprightly 
ancestress on the wall, and that " fair Dedlock " herself ; 
the whole cousinhood, debilitated and otherwise, but of 
one mind on such points as William Buffy's blameworthy 
neglect of his duty token in office ; all these make up a 
very probable picture of a house great enough — or think- 
ing itself great enough — to look at the affairs of the world 
from the family point of view. In Lady Dedlock alone 
a failure must be admitted; but she, with her wicked 
double, the uncanny French maid Hortense, exists only 
for the sake of the plot. 

With all its merits, Bleak House has little of that charm 
which belongs to so many of Dickens's earlier stories, and 
to David Copperfield above all. In part, at least, this 
may be due to the excessive severity of the task which 
Dickens had set himself in Bleak House / for hardly any 
other of his works is constructed on so large a scale, or 
contains so many characters organically connected with 
the progress of its plot ; and in part, again, to the half- 
didactic, half-satirical purport of the story, which weighs 
heavily on the writer. An overstrained tone announces 
itself on the very first page ; an opening full of power — 
indeed, of genius — but pitched in a key which we feel at 
once will not, without effort, be maintained. On the sec- 
ond page the prose has actually become verse ; or how else 
can one describe part of the following apostrophe? 

" ' This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses 
and its blighted lands in every shire ; which has its worn-out lunatic 



v.] CHANGES. 117 

in every mad-house, and its dead in every church-yard ; which has its 
ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrow- 
ing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance ; 
which gives to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearing out 
the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope ; so 
overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an hon- 
ourable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does 
not often give — the warning, " Suffer any wrong that can be done 
you, rather than come here !" ' " 

It was possibly with some thought of giving to Bleak 
House also, though in a different way, the close relation 
to his experiences of living men to which David Cojyper- 
field had owed so much, that Dickens introduced into it 
two portraits. Doubtless, at first, his intention had by no 
means gone so far as this. His constant counsellor always 
disliked his mixing up in his fictitious characters any per- 
sonal reminiscences of particular men, experience having 
shown that in such cases the whole character came out 
more like than the author was aware. Nor can Dickens 
himself have failed to understand how such an experiment 
is always tempting, and always dangerous; how it is often 
irreconcilable with good feeling, and quite as often with 
good taste. In Bleak House, however, it occurred to him 
to introduce likenesses of two living men, both more or 
less well known to the public and to himself; and both 
of individualities too clearly marked for a portrait, or even 
a caricature, of either to be easily mistaken. Of that art 
of mystification which the authors of both English and 
French romans a clef have since practised with so much 
transient success, he was no master, and fortunately so ; 
for what could be more ridiculous than that the reader's 
interest in a character should be stimulated, first, by its 

being evidently the late Lord P-lm-rst-n or the P of 

O , and then by its being no less evidently somebody 



118 DICKENS. [chap. 

else ? It should be added that neither of the two portrait 
characters in Bleak House possesses the least importance 
for the conduct of the story, so that there is nothing to 
justify their introduction except whatever excellence may 
belong to them in themselves. 

Lawrence Boythorn is described by Mr. Sydney Colvin 
as drawn from Walter Savage Landor with his intellectual 
greatness left out. It was, of course, unlikely that his in- 
tellectual greatness should be left in, the intention obvi- 
ously being to reproduce what was eccentric in the ways 
and manner, with a suggestion of what was noble in the 
character, of Dickens's famous friend. Whether, had he 
attempted to do so, Dickens could have drawn a picture 
of the whole Landor, is another question. Landor, who 
could put into a classic dialogue that sense of the naif to 
which Dickens is generally a stranger, yet passionately ad- 
mired the most sentimental of all his young friend's poetic 
figures; and it might almost be said that- the intellectual 
natures of the two men were drawn together by the force 
of contrast. They appear to have first become intimate 
with one another during Landor's residence at Bath — 
which began in 1837 — and they frequently met at Gore 
House. At a celebration of the poet's birthday in his 
lodgings at Bath, so Forster tells us in his biography of 
Landor, " the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in 
the Curiosity Shoj? first dawned on the genius of its cre- 
ator." In Landor's spacious mind there was room for 
cordial admiration of an author the bent of whose genius 
differed widely from that of his own ; and he could thus 
afford to sympathise with his whole heart in a creation 
which men of much smaller intellectual build have pro- 
nounced mawkish and unreal. Dickens afterwards gave 
to one of his sons the names of Walter Landor ; and when 



t.] CHANGES. 119 

the old man died at last, after his godson, paid him an elo- 
quent tribute of respect in All the Year Round. In this 
paper the personal intention of the character of Boythorn 
is avowed by implication ; but though Landor esteemed 
and loved Dickens, it might seem matter for wonder, did 
not eccentrics after all sometimes cherish their own eccen- 
tricity, that his irascible nature failed to resent a rather 
doubtful compliment. For the character of Boythorn is 
whimsical rather than, in any but the earlier sense of the 
word, humorous. But the portrait, however imperfect, was 
in this instance, beyond all doubt, both kindly meant and 
kindly taken ; though it cannot be said to have added to 
the attractions of the book into which it is introduced. 

While no doubt ever existed as to this likeness, the case 
may not seem so clear with regard to the original of Har- 
old Skimpole. It would be far more pleasant to pass by 
without notice the controversy — if controversy it can be 
called — which this character provoked ; but a wrong done 
by one eminent man of letters to another, however unfore- 
seen its extent may have been, and however genuine the 
endeavour to repair its effect, becomes part of literary his- 
tory. That the original of Harold Skimpole was Leigh 
Hunt cannot reasonably be called into question. This as- 
sertion by no means precludes the possibility, or probabili- 
ty, that a second original suggested certain features in the 
portrait. Nor does it contradict the substantial truthful- 
ness of Dickens's own statement, published in All the Year 
Round after Leigh Hunt's death, on the appearance of the 
new edition of the Autobiography with Thornton Hunt's 
admirable introduction. While, Dickens then wrote, " he 
yielded to the temptation of too often making the charac- 
ter speak like his old friend," yet "he no more thought, 
God forgive him ! that the admired original would ever be 



120 DICKENS. [chap. 

charged with the imaginary vices of the fictitious creature, 
than he had himself ever thought of charging the blood of 
Desdemona and Othello on the innocent Academy model 
who sat for Iago's leg in the picture. Even as to the mere 
occasional manner," he declared that he had " altered the 
whole of that part of the text, when two intimate friends 
of Leigh Hunt — both still living — discovered too strong 
a resemblance to his ' way.' " But, while accepting this 
statement, and suppressing a regret that after discovering 
the dangerous closeness of the resemblance Dickens should 
have, quite at the end of the story, introduced a satirical 
reference to Harold Skimpole's autobiography — Leigh 
Hunt's having been published only a year or two before 
— one must confess that the explanation only helps to 
prove the rashness of the offence. While intending the 
portrait to keep its own secret from the general public, 
Dickens at the same time must have wished to gratify a 
few keen-sighted friends. In March, 1852, he writes to 
Forstcr, evidently in reference to the apprehensions of his 
correspondent: "Browne has done Skimpole, and helped 
to make him singularly unlike the great original." The 
" great original " was a man for whom, both before and 
after this untoward incident in the relations between them, 
Dickens professed a warm regard, and who, to judge from 
the testimony of those who knew him well, 1 and from his 
unaffected narrative of his own life, abundantly deserved 
it. A perusal of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography suffices to 
show that he used to talk in Skimpole's manner, and even 

1 Among these is Mr. Alexander Ireland, the author of the Bibliog- 
raphy of Leigh Hunt and Hazl iff, who has kindly communicated to 
me part of his collections concerning the former. The tittle-tattle 
against Leigh Hunt repeated by Lord Macaulay is, on the face of it, 
unworthy of notice. 



v.] CHANGES. 121 

to write in it ; that he was at one period of his life alto- 
gether ignorant of money matters, and that he cultivated 
cheerfulness on principle. But it likewise shows that his 
ignorance of business was acknowledged by him as a mis- 
fortune in which he was very far from exulting. " Do I 
boast of this ignorance?" he writes. "Alas! I have no 
such respect for the pedantry of absurdity as that. I 
blush for it, and I only record it out of a sheer painful 
movement of conscience, as a warning to those young au- 
thors who might be led to look upon such folly as a fine 
thing, which at all events is what I never thought it my- 
self." On the other hand, as his son showed, his cheer- 
fulness, which was not inconsistent' with a natural prone- 
ness to intervals of melancholy, rested on grounds which 
were the result of a fine as well as healthy morality. " The 
value of cheerful opinions," he wrote, in words embodying 
a moral that Dickens himself was never weary of enforc- 
ing, " is inestimable ; they will retain a sort of heaven 
round a man, when everything else might fail him, and 
consequently they ought to be religiously inculcated upon 
his children." At the same time, no quality was more 
conspicuous in his life than his readiness for hard work, 
even under the most depressing circumstances ; and no 
feature was more marked in his moral character than his 
conscientiousness. " In the midst of the sorest tempta- 
tions," Dickens wrote of him, " he maintained his honesty 
unblemished by a single stain ; and in all public and pri- 
vate transactions he was the very soul of truth and hon- 
our." To mix up with the outward traits of such a man 
the detestable obliquities of Harold Skimpole was an ex- 
periment paradoxical even as a mere piece of character- 
drawing. The merely literary result is a failure, while a 
wound was needlessly inflicted, if not upon Leigh Hunt 
I G* 



122 DICKENS. [chap. 

himself, at least upon all who cherished his friendship or 
good name. Dickens seems honestly and deeply to have 
regretted what he had done, and the extremely tasteful lit- 
tle tribute to Leigh Hunt's poetic gifts which, some years 
before the death of the latter, Dickens wrote for Household 
Woi-ds, 1 must have partaken of the nature of an amende 
honorable. Neither his subsequent repudiation of unfriend- 
ly intentions, nor his earlier exertions on Leigh Hunt's be- 
half, are to be overlooked, but they cannot undo a mistake 
which forms an unfortunate incident in Dickens's literary 
life, singularly free though that life, as a whole, is from the 
miseries of personal quarrels, and all the pettinesses with 
which the world of letters is too familiar. 

While Dickens was engaged upon a literary work such 
as would have absorbed the intellectual energies of most 
men, he not only wrote occasionally for his journal, but 
also dictated for publication in it, the successive portions 
of a book altogether outside his usual range of authorship. 
This was A Child's History of England, the only one of 
his works that was not written by his own hand. A his- 
tory of England, written by Charles Dickens for his own 
or any one else's children, was sure to be a different work 
from one written under similar circumstances by Mr. Free- 
man or the late M. Guizot. The book, though it cannot 
be called a success, is, however, by no means devoid of 
interest. Just ten years earlier he had written, and print- 
ed, a history of England for the benefit of his eldest son, 
then a hopeful student of the age of five, which was com- 
posed, as he informed Douglas Jerrold at the time, " in the 
exact spirit " of that advanced politician's paper, " for I 
don't know what I should do if he were to get hold of 
any Conservative or High Church notions ; and the best 
1 By Rail to Parnassus, June 16, 1855. 



r.] CHANGES. 123 

way of guarding against any such horrible result is, I take 
it, to wring the parrots' necks in his very cradle." The 
Child's History of England is written in the same spirit, 
and illustrates more directly, and, it must be added, more 
coarsely, than any of Dickens's other works his hatred of 
ecclesiasticism of all kinds. Thus, the account of Dunstan 
is pervaded by a prejudice which is the fruit of anything 
but knowledge ; Edward the Confessor is " the dreary old " 
and " the maudlin Confessor ;" and the Pope and what be- 
longs to him are treated with a measure of contumely which 
would have satisfied the heart of Leigh Hunt himself. To 
be sure, if King John is dismissed as a " miserable brute," 
King Henry the Eighth is not more courteously designated 
as a " blot of blood and grease upon the history of Eng- 
land." On the other hand, it could hardly be but that 
certain passages of the national story should be well told 
by so great a master of narrative ; and though the strain 
in which parts of the history of Charles the Second are 
recounted strikes one as hardly suitable to the young, to 
whom irony is in general caviare indeed, yet there are 
touches both in the story of "this merry gentleman" — a 
designation which almost recalls Fagin — and elsewhere in 
the book not unworthy of its author. Its patriotic spirit 
is quite as striking as its Radicalism ; and vulgar as some 
of its expressions must be called, there is a pleasing glow 
in the passage on King Alfred, which declares the " Eng- 
lish-Saxon " character to have been " the greatest character 
among the nations of the earth ;" and there is a yet nobler 
enthusiasm, such as it would indeed be worth any writer's 
while to infuse into the young, in the passionate earnest- 
ness with which, by means of the story of Agincourt, the 
truth is enforced that " nothing can make war otherwise 
than horrible." 



124 DICKENS. [chap. 

This book must have been dictated, and some at least 
of the latter portion of Bleak House written, at Boulogne, 
where, after a spring sojourn at Brighton, Dickens spent the 
summer of 1853, and where were also passed the summers 
of 1854 and 1856. Boulogne, where Le Sage's last years 
were spent, was Our French Watering-place, so graphical- 
ly described in a paper in Household Words as a compan- 
ion picture to the old familiar Broadstairs. The family 
were comfortably settled on a green hill-side close to the 
town, " in a charming garden in a very pleasant country," 
with " excellent light wines on the premises, French cook- 
ery, millions of roses, two cows — for milk-punch — vegeta- 
bles cut for the pot, and handed in at the kitchen win- 
dow ; five summer-houses, fifteen fountains — with no water 
in 'em — and thirty-seven clocks — keeping, as I conceive, 
Australian time, having no reference whatever to the hours 
on this side of the globe." The energetic owner of the 
Villa des Moulineaux was the " M. Loyal Devasseur " of 
Our French Watering-place — jovial, convivial, genial, sen- 
timental too as a Buonapartist and a patriot. In 1854 
the same obliging personage housed the Dickens family in 
another abode, at the top of the hill, close to the famous 
Napoleonic column; but in 1856 they came back to the 
Moulineaux. The former year had been an exciting one 
for Englishmen in France, with royal visits to and fro to 
testify to the entente cordiale between the governments. 
Dickens, notwithstanding his humorous assertions, was 
only moderate^ touched by the Sebastopol fever ; but 
when a concrete problem came before him in the shape of 
a festive demonstration, he addressed himself to it with 
the irrepressible ardour of the born stage-manager. " In 
our own proper illumination," he writes, on the occasion 
of the Prince Consort's visit to the camp at Boulogne,/'! 



v.] CUANGES. 125 

laid on all the servants, all the children now at home, all 
the visitors, one to every window, with everything ready 
to light up on the ringing of a big dinner-bell by your 
humble correspondent. St. Peter's on Easter Monday was 
the result." 

Of course, at Boulogne, Dickens was cut off neither 
from his business nor from his private friends. His hos- 
pitable invitations were as urgent to his French villa in 
the summer as to his London house in the winter, and 
on both sides of the water the Household Words familiars 
were as sure of a welcome from their chief. During his 
absences from London he could have had no trustier lieu- 
tenant than Mr. W. II. Wills, with whom, being always 
ready to throw himself into a part, he corresponded in an 
■amusing paragraphed, semi-official style. And neither in 
his working nor in his leisure hours had he by this time 
any more cherished companion than Mr. Wilkie Collins, 
whose progress towards brilliant success he was watching 
with the keenest and kindliest interest. With him and 
'his old friend Augustus Egg, Dickens, in October, 1853, 
started on a tour to Switzerland and Italy, in the course 
of which he saw more than one old friend, and revisited 
more than one known scene — ascending Vesuvius with 
Mr. Layard and drinking punch at Rome with David Rob- 
erts. It would be absurd to make any lofty demands 
upon the brief records of a holiday journey ; and, for my 
part, I would rather think of Dickens assiduous over his 
Christmas number at Rome and at Venice, than weigh his 
moralisings about the electric telegraph running through 
the Coliseum. His letters written to his wife during this 
trip are bright and gay, and it was certainly no roving 
bachelor who " kissed almost all the children he encoun- 
tered in remembrance of the sweet faces " of his own, and 



126 DICKENS. [chap. 

"talked to all the mothers who carried them." By the 
middle of December the travellers were home again, and 
before the year was out he had read to large audiences at 
Birmingham, on behalf of a public institution, his favour- 
ite Cbristmas stories of The Christmas Carol and The 
Cricket on the Hearth. As yet, however, his mind was 
not seriously intent upon any labours but those proper to 
his career as an author, and the year 1854 saw, between 
the months of April and August, the publication in his 
journal of a new story, which is among the most charac- 
teristic, though not among the most successful, of his 
works of fiction. 

In comparison with most of Dickens's novels, Hard 
Times is contained within a narrow compass ; and this, with 
the further necessity of securing to each successive small 
portion of the story a certain immediate degree of effect- 
iveness, accounts, in some measure, for the peculiarity of 
the impression left by this story upon many of its readers. 
Short as the story relatively is, few of Dickens's fictions 
were elaborated with so much care. He had not intended 
to write a new stor} 7 for a twelvemonth, when, 'as he says, 
" the idea laid hold of him by the throat in a very violent 
manner," and the labour, carried on under conditions of 
peculiar irksomeness, "used him up" after a quite un- 
accustomed fashion. The book thus acquired a precision 
of form and manner which commends it to the French 
school of criticism rather than to lovers of English humour 
in its ampler forms and more flowing moods. At the 
same time the work has its purpose so visibly imprinted 
on its front, as almost to forbid our regarding it in the 
first instance apart from the moral which avowedly it is 
intended to inculcate. This moral, by no means new 
with Dickens, has both a negative and a positive side. 



v.] CHANGES. 127 

" Do not harden your hearts," is the negative injunction, 
more especially *do not harden them against the prompt- 
ings of that human kindness which should draw together 
man and man, old and young, rich and poor ; and keep 
your sympathies fresh by bringing nourishment to them 
through channels which prejudice or short-sightedness 
would fain narrow or stop up. This hortatory purpose 
assumes the form of invective and even of angry menace ; 
and "utilitarian economists, skeletons of school - masters, 
commissioners of facts, genteel and used-up infidels, gab- 
blers of many little dog's-eared creeds," are warned: 
" The poor you have always with you. Cultivate in them, 
while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies 
and affections, to adorn their lives, so much in need of or- 
nament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is 
utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare ex- 
istence stand face to face, reality will take a wolfish turn, 
and make an end of you." 

No authority, however eminent, not even Mr. Ruskin's, 
is required to teach reflecting minds the infinite impor- 
tance of the principles which Hard Times was intended 
to illustrate. Nor is it of much moment whether the 
illustrations are always exact ; whether the " commission- 
ers of facts" have reason to protest that the unimagina- 
tive character of their processes does not necessarily imply 
an unimaginative purpose in their ends; whether there is 
any actual Coketown in existence within a hundred miles 
of Manchester; or .whether it suffices that "everybody 
knew what was meant, but every cotton -spinning town 
said it was the other cotton-spinning town." The chief 
personal grievance of Stephen Blackpool has been removed 
or abated, but the " muddle " is not yet altogether cleared 
up which prevents the nation and the " national dustmen," 



128 DICKENS. [chap. 

its law-givers, from impartially and sympathetically further- 
ing the interest of all classes. In a word, the moral of 
Hard Times has not yet lost its force, however imperfect 
or unfair the method may have been in which it is urged 
in the book. 

Unfortunately, however, a work of art with a didactic 
purpose is only too often prone to exaggerate what seems 
of special importance for the purpose in question, and to 
heighten contrasts which seem likely to put it in the clear- 
est light. "Thomas Gradgrind, sir" — who announces 
himself with something of the genuine Lancashire roll — • 
and his system are a sound and a laughable piece of satire, 
to begin with, only here and there marred by the satirist's 
imperfect knowledge of the details which he caricatures. 
The " Manchester School," which the novel strives to ex- 
pose, is in itself to a great extent a figment of the imag- 
ination, which to this day serves to round many a hollow 
period in oratory and journalism. Who, it may fairly be 
asked, were the parliamentary politicians satirized in the 
member for Coketown, deaf and blind to any considera- 
tion but the multiplication-table? But in any case the 
cause hardly warrants one of its consequences as depicted 
in the novel — the utter brntalization of a stolid nature like 
" the Whelp's." When Gradgrind's son is about to be 
shipped abroad out of reach of the penalties of his crime, 
he reminds his father that he merely exemplifies the sta- 
tistical law that " so many people out of so many will be 
dishonest." When the virtuous Bitzer is indignantly ask- 
ed whether he has a heart, he replies that he is physiolog- 
ically assured of the fact; and to the further inquiry 
whether this heart of his is accessible to compassion, 
makes answer that " it is accessible to reason, and to noth- 
ing else." These returnings of Mr. Gradgrind's philoso- 



v.] CHANGES. 12!) 

phy upon himself savour of the moral justice represented 
by Gratiano in the fourth act. So, again, Coketown, with 
its tall chimneys and black river, and its thirteen religious 
denominations, to which whoever else belonged the work- 
ing-men did not, is no perverse contradiction of fact. But 
the influence of Coketown, or of a whole wilderness of 
Coketowns, cannot justly be charged with a tendency to 
ripen such a product as Josiah Bounderby, who is not 
only the " bully of humanity," but proves to be a mean- 
spirited impostor in his pretensions to the glory of self- 
help. In short, Hard Times errs by its attempt to prove 
too much. 

Apart, however, from the didactic purposes which over- 
burden it, the pathos and humour of particular portions of 
this tale appear to me to have been in no wise overrated. 
The domestic tragedy of Stephen and Rachael has a sub- 
dued intensity of tenderness and melancholy of a kind 
rare with Dickens, upon whom the example of Mrs. Gas- 
kell in this instance may not have been without its in- 
fluence. Nor is there anything more delicately and at the 
same time more appropriately conceived in any of his 
works than poor Rachael's dominion over the imagination 
as well as over the affections of her noble-minded and un- 
fortunate lover : " As the shining stars were to the heavy 
candle in the window, so was Rachael, in the l-ugged fancy 
of this man, to the common experiences of his life." The 
love-story of poor Louisa is of a different kind, and more 
wordy in the telling; yet here also the feelings painted 
are natural and true. The humorous interest is almost 
entirely concentrated upon the company of horse-riders ; 
and never has Dickens's extraordinary powsr of humorous 
observation more genially asserted itself. From Mr. Sleary 
— " thtout man, game-eye " — and his protagonist, Mr. E. 



130 DICKENS. [chap. 

W. B. Childers, wlio, when he shook his long hair, caused 
it to "shake all at once," down to Master Kidderminster, 
who used to form the apex of the human pyramids, and 
"in whose young- nature there was an original flavour of 
the misanthrope," these honest equestrians are more than 
worthy to stand by the side of Mr. Vincent Crummies and 
his company of actors ; and the fun has here, in addition 
to the grotesqueness of the earlier picture, a mellowness 
of its own. Dickens's comic genius was never so much at 
its ease and so inexhaustible in ludicrous fancies as in the 
depiction of such groups as this ; and the horse-riders, 
skilfully introduced to illustrate a truth, wholesome if not 
novel, would have insured popularity to a far less interest- 
ing and to a far less powerful fiction. 

The year after that which saw the publication of Hard 
Times was one in which the thoughts of most Englishmen 
were turned away from the problems approached in that 
story. But if the military glories of 1854 had not aroused 
in him any very exuberant enthusiasm, the reports from 
the Crimea in the ensuing winter were more likely to ap- 
peal to his patriotism as well as to his innate-impatience 
of disorder and incompetence. In the first instance, how- 
ever, he contented himself with those grumblings to which, 
as a sworn foe of red tape and a declared disbeliever in 
our parliamentary system, he mighr claim to have a spe- 
cial right ; and he seems to have been too restless in and 
about himself to have entered very closely into the progress 
of public affairs. The Christmas had been a merry one 
at Tavistock House ; and the amateur theatricals of its 
juvenile company had passed through a most successful 
season. Their history has. been written by one of the 
performers- — himself not the least distinguished of the 
company, since it was he who, in Dickens's house, caused 



v.] CHANGES. 131 

Thackeray to roll off his seat in a fit of laughter. Dick- 
ens, who with Mark Lemon disported himself among these 
precocious minnows, was, as our chronicler relates, like 
Triplet, " author, manager, and actor too," organiser, de- 
viser, and harmoniser of all the incongruous assembled 
elements ; it was he " who improvised costumes, painted 
and corked our innocent cheeks, and suggested all the 
most effective business of the scene." But, as was usual 
with him, the transition was rapid from play to something 
veiy like earnest; and already, in June, 1855, the Tavis- 
tock House theatre produced Mr. Wilkie Collins's melo- 
drama of The Light-house, which afterwards found its way 
to the public stage. To Dickens, who performed in it 
with the author, it afforded " scope for a piece of acting 
of great power," the old sailor Aaron Gurnock, which by 
its savage picturesqueness earned a tribute of recognition 
from Carlyle. No less a hand than Stanfield painted the 
scenery, and Dickens himself, besides writing the prologue, 
introduced into the piece a ballad called The Story of the 
Wreck, a not unsuccessful effort in Cowper's manner. At 
Christmas, 1856 -'57, there followed The Frozen Deep, 
another melodrama by the same author ; and by this time 
the management of his private theatricals had become to 
Dickens a serious business, to be carried on seriously for 
its own sake. " It was to him," he wrote, " like writing a 
book in company ;" and his young people might learn 
from it " that kind of humility which is got from the 
earned knowledge that whatever the right hand finds to 
do must be done with the heart in it, and in a desperate 
earnest." The Frozen Deep was several times repeated, 
on one occasion for the benefit of the daughter of the 
recently deceased Douglas Jerrold ; but by the end of 
January the little theatre was finally broken up ; and 



132 DICKENS. [chap. 

though Dickens spent one more winter season at Tavi- 
stock House, the shadow was then already falling upon 
his cheerful home. 

In the midst of his children's Christmas gaieties of the 
year 1855 Dickens had given two or three public read- 
ings to " wonderful audiences " in various parts of the 
country. A trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins had fol- 
lowed, during which, as he wrote home, he was wandering 
about Paris all day, dining at all manner of places, and 
frequenting the theatres at the rate of two or three a night. 
" I suppose," he adds, with pleasant self-irony, " as an old 
farmer said of Scott, I am ' makin' myscl" all the time; 
but I seem to be rather a free-and-easy sort of superior 
vagabond." And in truth a roving, restless spirit was 
strong upon him in these years. Already, in April, he 
speaks of himself as "going off; I don't know where or 
how far, to ponder about I don't know what." France, 
Switzerland, Spain, Constantinople, in Mr. Layard's com- 
pany, had been successively in his thoughts, and, for aught 
he knew, Greenland and the North Pole might occur to 
him next. At the same time he foresaw that the end of 
it all would be his shutting himself up in some out-of-the- 
way place of which he had not yet thought, and going 
desperately to work there. 

Before, however, these phantasmagoric schemes had sub- 
sided into the quiet plan of an autumn visit to Folkestone, 
followed during the winter and spring by a residence at 
Paris, he had at least found a subject to ponder on, which 
was to suggest an altogether novel element in his next 
work of fiction. I have said that though, like the major- 
ity of his fellow-countrymen, Dickens regarded our war 
with Russia as inevitable, yet his hatred of all war, and his 
impatience of the exaggerations of passion and sentiment 



v.J CHANGES. 188 

which all war produces, had preserved him from himself 
falling a victim to their contagion. On the other hand, 
when in the winter of lS54-'55 the note of exultation in 
the bravery of our soldiers in the Crimea began to be in- 
termingled with complaints against the grievously defec- 
tive arrangements for their comfort and health, and when 
these complaints, stimulated by the loud-voiced energy of 
the press, and extending into censures upon the whole 
antiquated and perverse system of our army administra- 
tion, speedily swelled into a roar of popular indignation, 
sincere conviction ranged him on the side of the most un- 
compromising malcontents. He was at all times ready to 
give vent to that antipathy against • officialism which is 
shared by so large a number of Englishmen. Though the 
son of a dock-yard official, he is found roundly asserting 
that "more obstruction of good things and patronage of 
bad things has been committed in the dock-yards — as in 
everything connected with the misdirection of the navy — 
than in every other branch of the public service put to- 
gether, including " — the particularisation is hard — " even 
the Woods and Forests." He had listened, we may be 
sure, to the scornful denunciations launched by the prophet 
of the Latter-Day Panyihlets against Downing Street and 
all its works, and to the proclamation of the great though 
rather vague truth that " reform in that Downing Street 
department of affairs is precisely the reform which were 
worth all others." And now the heart-rending sufferings 
of multitudes of brave men had brought to light, in one 
department of the public administration, a series of com- 
plications and perversities which in the end became so 
patent to the Government itself that they had to be rough- 
ly remedied in the very midst of the struggle. The cry 
for administrative reform, which arose in the year 1855,, 



134 DICKENS. [chap. 

however crude the form it frequently took, was in itself a 
logical enough result of the situation ; and there is no 
doubt that the angriness of the complaint was intensified 
by the attitude taken up in the House of Commons by the 
head of the Government towards the pertinacious politi- 
cian who made himself the mouthpiece of the extreme de- 
mands of the feeling outside. Mr. Layard was Dickens's 
valued friend ; and the share is thus easily explained 
which — against his otherwise uniform practice of abstain- 
ing from public meetings — the most popular writer of the 
day took in the Administrative Reform meetings, held in 
Drury Lane Theatre, on June 27, 1855. The speech 
which he delivered on this occasion, and which was intend- 
ed to aid in forcing the "whole question" of Administra- 
tive Reform upon the attention of an unwilling Govern- 
ment, possesses no value whatever in connexion with its 
theme, though of course it is not devoid of some smart and 
telling hits. Not on the platform, but at his desk as an au- 
thor, was Dickens to do real service to the cause of admin- 
istrative efficiency. For whilst invective of a general kind 
runs off like water from the rock of usage, even Circumlocu- 
tion Offices are not insensible to the acetous force of satire. 
Dickens's caricature of British officialism formed the 
most generally attractive element in the story of Little 
Don-it — originally intended to be called Nobody's Fault 
— which he published in monthly numbers, from Decem- 
ber, 1855, that year, to June, 1857. He was solemnly 
taken to task for his audacity by the Edinburgh Review, 
which reproached him for his persistent ridicule of " the 
institutions of the country, the laws, the administration, 
in a word, the government under which we live." His 
" charges " were treated as hardly seriously meant, but as 
worthy of severe reprobation, because likely to be serious- 



v.] CHANGES. 136 

ly taken by the poor, the uneducated, and the young. 
And the caricaturist, besides being reminded of the names 
of several eminent public servants, was specially requested 
to look, as upon a picture contrasting with his imaginary 
Circumlocution Office, upon the Post Office, or — for the 
the choice offered was not more extensive — upon the Lon- 
don police, so liberally praised by himself in his own jour- 
nal. The delighted author of Little Dorrit replied to this 
not very skilful diatribe in a short and spirited rejoinder 
in Household Words. In this he judiciously confined him- 
self to refuting an unfounded incidental accusation in the 
Edinburgh article, and to dwelling, as upon a " Curious 
Misprint," upon the indignant query: "How does he ac- 
count for the career of Mr. Rowland Hill ?" whose name, 
as an example of the ready intelligence of the Circumlocu- 
tion Office, was certainly an odd erratum. Had he, how- 
ever, cared to make a more general reply to the main article 
of the indictment, he might have pointed out that, as a 
matter of fact, our official administrative machinery had re- 
cently broken down in one of its most important branches, 
and that circumlocution in the literal sense of the word — 
circumlocution between department and department, or of 
flee and office — had been one of the principal causes of the 
collapse. The general drift of the satire was, therefore, in 
accordance with fact, and the satire itself salutary in its 
character. To quarrel with it for not taking into consid- 
eration what might be said on the other side, was to quar- 
rel with the method of treatment which satire has at all 
times considered itself entitled to adopt ; while to stigma- 
tise a popular book as likely to mislead the ill-informed, 
was to suggest a restraint which would have deprived wit 
and humour of most of their opportunities of rendering 
service to cither a good or an evil cause. 



136 DICKENS. [chap. 

A far more legitimate exception has been taken to these 
Circumlocution Office episodes as defective in art by the 
very reason of their being exaggerations. Those best ac- 
quainted with the interiors of our government offices may 
be right in denying that the Barnacles can be regarded as 
an existing type. Indeed, it would at no time have been 
easy to point to any office quite as labyrinthine, or quite 
as bottomless, as that permanently presided over by Mr. 
Tite Barnacle ; to any chief secretary or commissioner so 
absolutely wooden of fibre as he ; or to any private secre- 
tary so completely absorbed in his eye-glass as Barnacle 
junior. But as satirical figures they one and all fulfil their 
purpose as thoroughly as the picture of the official sanc- 
tum itself, with its furniture " in the higher official man- 
ner," and its "general bamboozling air of how not to do 
it." The only question is, whether satire which, if it is to 
be effective, must be of a piece and in its way exaggerated, 
is not out of place in a pathetic and humorous fiction, 
where, like a patch of too diverse a thread, it interferes 
with the texture into which it is introduced. In them 
selves these passages of Little Dorrit deserve to remain 
unforgotten amongst the masterpieces of literary carica- 
ture ; and there is, I do not hesitate to say, something of 
Swiftian force in their grotesque embodiment of a popular 
current of indignation. The mere name of the Circumlo- 
cution Office was a stroke of genius, one of those phrases 
of Dickens which Professor Masson justly describes as, 
whether exaggerated or not, " efficacious for social re- 
form." As usual, Dickens had made himself well ac- 
quainted with the formal or outside part of his subject ; 
the very air of Whitehall seems to gather round us as 
Mr. Tite Barnacle, in answer to a persistent enquirer who 
" wants to know " the position of a particular matter, 



t.] CHANGES. 1ST 

concedes that it " may have been, in the course of official 
business, referred to the Circumlocution Office for its con- 
sideration," and that " the department may have either 
originated, or confirmed, a minute on the subject." In 
the Household Words paper called A Poor Man's Tale 
of a Patent (1850) will be found a sufficiently elaborate 
study for Mr. Doyce's experiences of the government of 
his country, as wrathfully narrated by Mr. Meaglcs. 

With the exception of the Circumlocution Office pas- 
sages — adventitious as they are to the progress of the ac- 
tion — Little Dorrit exhibits a palpable falling-off in in- 
ventive power. Forster illustrates by a striking fac-simile 
the difference between the " labour and pains " of the au- 
thor's short notes for Little Dorrit and the "lightness and 
confidence of handling" in what hints he had jotted down 
for David Copperfield. Indeed, his " tablets " had about 
this time begun to be an essential part of his literary 
equipment. But in Little Dorrit there are enough in- 
ternal signs of, possibly unconscious, lassitude. The earlier, 
no doubt, is, in every respect, the better part of the book ; 
or, rather, the later part shows the author wearily at work 
upon a canvas too wide for him, and filling it up with a 
crowd of personages in whom it is difficult to take much 
interest. Even Mr. Merdle and his catastrophe produce 
the effect rather of a ghastly allegory than of an " extrav- 
agant conception," as the author ironically called it in his 
preface, derived only too directly from real life. In the 
earlier part of the book, in. so far as it is not once again 
concerned with enforcing the moral of Hard Times in a 
different way, by means of Mrs. Clennam and her son's 
early history, the humour of Dickens plays freely over the 
figure of the Father of the Marshalsea. It is a psycho- 
logical masterpiece in its way ; but the revolting selfishness 
K 7 



138 DICKENS. [chap. 

of Little Dorrit's father is not redeemed artistically by her 
own long-suffering ; for her pathos lacks the old irresisti- 
ble ring. Doubtless much in this part of the story — the 
whole episode, for instance, of the honest turnkey — is in 
the author's best manner. But, admirable as it is, this 
new picture of prison-life and prison-sentiment has an un- 
dercurrent of bitterness, indeed, almost of contemptuous- 
ness, foreign to the best part of Dickens's genius. This 
is still more perceptible in a figure not less true to life 
than the Father of the Marshalsea himself — Flora, the 
overblown flower of Arthur Clennam's boyish love. The 
humour of the conception is undeniable, but the whole ef- 
fect is cruel ; and, though greatly amused, the reader feels 
almost as if he were abetting a profanation. Dickens 
could not have become what he is to the great multitude 
of his readers had he, as a humourist, often indulged in 
this cynical mood. 

There is in general little in the characters of this fiction 
to compensate for the sense of oppression from which, as 
he follows the slow course of its far from striking plot, the 
reader finds it difficult to free himself. A vein of genuine 
humour shows itself in Mr. Plornish, obviously a favourite 
of the author's, and one of those genuine working-men, as 
rare in fiction as on the stage, where Mr. Toole has repro- 
duced the species ; but the relation between Mr. and Mrs. 
Plornish is only a fainter revival of that between Mr. and 
Mrs. Bagney. Nor is there anything fresh or novel in the 
characters belonging to another social sphere. Henry 
Gowan, apparently intended as an elaborate study in psy- 
chology, is only a very tedious one ; and his mother at 
Hampton Court, whatever phase of a dilapidated aristocr 
r^cy she may be intended to caricature, is merely }ll-bred. 
As fop M.rs. General, she is so sorry a burlesque that she 



v.] CHANGES. 139 

could not be reproduced without extreme caution even on 
the stage — to the reckless conventionalities of which, in- 
deed, the whole picture of the Dorrit family as nouveaux 
riches bears a striking resemblance. There is, on the con- 
trary, some good caricature, which, in one instance at least, 
was thought transparent by the knowing, in the silhouettes 
of the great Mr. Merdle's professional guests ; but these 
are, like the Circumlocution Office puppets, satiric sketches, 
not the living figures of creative humour. 

I have spoken of this story with a censure which may 
be regarded as exaggerated in its turn. But I well remem- 
ber, at the time of its publication in numbers, the general 
consciousness that Little Dorrit was proving unequal to 
the high-strung expectations which a new work by Dick- 
ens then excited in his admirers, both young and old. 
There were new and striking features in it, with abundant 
comic and serious effect, but there was no power in the 
whole story to seize and hold, and the feeling could not be 
escaped that the author was not at his best. And Dickens 
was not at his best when he wrote Little Dorrit. Yet while 
nothing is more remarkable in the literary career of Dickens 
than this apparently speedy decline of his power, nothing is 
more wonderful in it than the degree to which he righted 
himself again, not, indeed, with his public, for the public 
never deserted its favourite, but with his genius. 

A considerable part of Little Dorrit must have been 
written in Paris, where, in October, after a quiet autumn 
at Folkestone, Dickens had taken a family apartment in 
the Avenue des Champs Elysees, ''about half a quarter 
of a mile above Franconi's." Here, after his fashion, he 
lived much to himself, his family, and his guests, only oc- 
casionally finding his way into a literary or artistic salon; 
but he sat for his portrait to both Ary and Henri Seheffer, 



140 DICKENS. [chap. 

and was easily persuaded to read his Cricket on the Hearth 
to an audience in the atelier. Macready and Mr. Wilkie 
Collins were in turn the companions of many " theatrical 
and lounging" evenings. Intent as Dickens now had 
become upon the technicalities of his own form of com- 
position, this interest must have been greatly stimulated 
by the frequent comparison of modern French plays, in 
most of which nicety of construction and effectiveness of 
situation have so paramount a significance. At Boulogne, 
too, Mr. Wilkie Collins was a welcome summer visitor. 
And in the autumn the two friends started on the Lazy- 
Tour of Tioo Idle Apprentices. It came to an untimely 
end as a pedestrian excursion, but the record of it is one 
of the pleasantest memorials of a friendship which bright- 
ened much of Dickens's life and intensified his activity in 
work as well as in pleasure. 

" Mr. Thomas Idle " had indeed a busy time of it in this 
year 1857. The publication of Little Dorrit was not fin- 
ished till June, and in August we find him, between a read- 
ing and a performance of The Frozen Deep at Manchester 
— then in the exciting days of the great Art Exhibition — 
thus describing to Macready his way of filling up his time : 
" I hope you have seen my tussle with the Edinburgh. I 
saw the chance last Friday week, as I was going down to- 
read the Carol in St. Martin's Hall. Instantly turned to,, 
then and there, and wrote half the article, flew out of bed 
early next morning, and finished it by noon. Went down 
to Gallery of Illustration (we acted that night), did the 
day's business, corrected the proofs in Polar costume in 
dressing-room, broke up two numbers of Household Words 
to get it out directly, played in Frozen Deep and Uncle 
John, presided at supper of company, made no end of 
speeches, went home and gave in completely for four hours,, 



v.] CHANGES. 141 

then got sound asleep, and next day was as fresh as you 
used to be in the far-off days of your lusty youth." It 
was on the occasion of the readings at St. Martin's Hall, 
for the benefit of Douglas Jerrold's family, that the thought 
of giving readings for his own benefit first suggested itself 
to Dickens; and, as will be seen, by April, 1858, the idea 
had been carried into execution, and a new phase of life 
had begun for him. And yet at this very time, when his 
home was about to cease being in the fullest sense a home 
to Dickens, by a strange irony of fortune, he had been en- 
abled to carry out a long-cherished fancy and to take pos- 
session, in the first instance as a summer residence, of the 
house on Gad's Hill, of which a lucky chance had made 
him the owner rather more than a twelvemonth before. 

" My little place," he wrote in 1858, to his Swiss friend 
Cerjat, " is a grave red-brick house (time of George the 
First, I suppose), which I have added to and stuck bits 
upon in all manner of ways, so that it is as pleasantly ir- 
regular, and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas, 
as the most hopeful man could possibly desire. It is on 
the summit of Gad's Hill. The robbery was committed 
before the door, on the man with the treasure, and Falstaff 
ran away from the identical spot of ground now covered 
by the room in which I write. A little rustic ale-house, 
called 'The Sir John Falstaff,' is over the way — has been 
over the way ever since, in honour of the event. . . . The 
whole stupendous property is on the old Dover road. . . ." 

Among "the blessed woods and fields" which, as he 
says, had done him " a world of good," in a season of un- 
ceasing bodily and mental unrest, the great English writer 
had indeed found a habitation fitted to become inseparable 
from his name and fame. It was not till rather later, in 
I860, that, after the sale of Tavistock House, Gad's Hill 



142 DICKENS. [chap. 

Place became his regular abode, a London house being 
only now and then taken for the season, while furnished 
rooms were kept at the office in Wellington Street for oc- 
casional use. And it was only gradually that he enlarged 
and improved his Kentish place so as to make it the pretty 
and comfortable country-house which at the present day it 
appears to be ; constructing, in course of time, the passage 
under the high-road to the shrubbery, where the Swiss 
chalet given to him by Mr. Fechter was set up, and build- 
ing the pretty little conservatory, which, when completed, 
he was not to live many days to enjoy. But an old-fash- 
ioned, homely look, free from the slightest affectation of 
quietness, belonged to Gad's Hill Place, even after all these 
alterations, and belongs to it even at this day, when Dick- 
ens's solid old-fashioned furniture has been changed. In 
the pretty little front hall still hangs the illuminated tablet 
recalling the legend of Gad's Hill ; and on the inside pan- 
els of the library door remain the facetious sham book- 
titles : " Hudson's Complete Failure" and " Ten Minutes in 
China,''' 1 and " Cats' Lives,'''' and, on a long series of leather 
backs, Hansard's Guide to Refreshing Sleep." The rooms 
are all of a modest size, and the bedrooms — amongst them 
Dickens's own — very low ; but the whole house looks thor- 
oughly habitable, while the views across the cornfields at 
the back are such as in their undulation of soft outline are 
nowhere more pleasant than in Kent. Rochester and the 
Medway are near, even for those who do not — like Dickens 
and his dogs — count a stretch past three or four " mile- 
stones on the Dover road" as the mere beginning of an 
afternoon's walk. At a distance little greater there are in 
one direction the green glades of Cobham Park, with Chalk 
and Gravesend beyond ; and in another the flat country 
towards the Thames, with its abundance of market-gardens. 



v.] CHANGES. 143 

There, too, are the marshes on the border of which lie the 
massive ruin of Cooling Castle, the refuge of the Lollard 
martyr who was not concerned in the affair on Gad's Hill, 
and Cooling Church and church-yard, with the quaint little 
gravestones in the grass. London and the office were with- 
in easy reach, and Paris itself was, for practical purposes, 
not much farther away, so that, in later days at all events, 
Dickens found himself " crossing the Channel perpetually." 

The name of Dickens still has a good sound in and 
about Gad's Hill. He was on very friendly terms with 
some families whose houses stand near to his own ,' and 
though nothing was farther from his nature, as he says, 
than to " wear topboots " and play the squire, yet he had 
in him not a little of what endears so many a resident 
country gentleman to his neighbourhood. He was head 
organiser rather than chief patron of village sports, of 
cricket matches and foot races ; and his house was a dis- 
pensary for the poor of the parish. He established con- 
fidential relations between his house and the Falstaff Inn 
over the way, regulating his servants' consumption of beer 
on a strict but liberal plan of his own devising; but it is 
not for this reason only that the successor of Mr. Edwin 
Trood — for such was the veritable name of mine host of 
the " Falstaff" in Dickens's time — declares that it was a bad 
day for the neighbourhood when Dickens was taken away 
from it. In return, nothing could exceed the enthusiasm 
which surrounded him in his own country, and Forster has 
described his astonishment at the manifestation of it on 
the occasion of the wedding of the youngest daughter of 
the house in 1860. And, indeed, he was born to be popu- 
lar, and specially among those by whom he was beloved as 
a friend or honoured as a benefactor. 

But it was not for long intervals of either work or rest 



144 DICKENS. [chap. 

that Dickens was to settle down in his pleasant country 
house, nor was he ever, except quite at the last, to sit 
down under his own roof in peace and quiet, a wanderer 
no more. Less than a year after he had taken up his resi- 
dence for the summer on Gad's Hill his home, and that of 
his younger children, was his wife's home no longer. The 
separation, which appears to have been preparing itself 
for some, but no very long, time, took place in May, 1858, 
when, after an amicable arrangement, Mrs. Dickens left her 
husband, who henceforth allowed her an ample separate 
maintenance, and occasionally corresponded with her, but 
never saw her again. The younger children remained in 
their father's house under the self-sacrificing and devoted 
care of Mrs. Dickens's surviving sister, Miss Hogarth. 
Shortly afterwards, Dickens thought it well, in printed 
words which may be left forgotten, to rebut some slander- 
ous gossip which, as the way of the world is, had misrep- 
resented the circumstances of this separation. The causes 
of the event were an open secret to his friends and ac- 
quaintances. If he had ever loved his wife with that af- 
fection before which so-called incompatibilities of habits, 
temper, or disposition fade into nothingness, there is no 
indication of it in any of his numerous letters addressed 
to her. Neither has it ever been pretended that he strove 
in the direction of that resignation which love and duty 
together made possible to David Copperfield, or even that 
he remained in every way master of himself, as many men 
have known how to remain, the story of whose wedded 
life and its disappointments has never been written in his- 
tory or figured in fiction. It was not incumbent upon his 
faithful friend and biographer, and much less can it be 
upon one whom nothing but a sincere admiration of Dick- 
ens's geuius entitles to speak of him at all, to declare the 



v.] CHANGES. 145 

standard by which the most painful transaction in his life 
is to be judged. I say the most painful, for it is with a 
feeling akin to satisfaction that one reads, in a letter three 
years afterwards to a lady in reference to her daughter's 
wedding : " I want to thank you also for thinking of me on 
the occasion, but I feel that I am better away from it. I 
should really have a misgiving that I was a sort of a 
shadow on a young marriage, and you will understand 
me when I say so, and no more." A shadow, too — who 
would deny it? — falls on every one of the pictures in 
which the tenderest of modern humourists has painted 
the simple joys and the sacred sorrows of that home life 
of which to his generation he had become almost the 
poet and the prophet, when we remember how he was 
himself neither blessed with its full happiness nor capable 
of accepting with resignation the imperfection inherent in 
it, as in all things human. 
7* 



CHAPTER VI. 

LAST YEARS. 
[1858-1870.] 

The last twelve years of Dickens's life were busy years, 
like the others ; but his activity was no longer merely the 
expression of exuberant force, and long before the collapse 
came he had been repeatedly warned of the risks he con- 
tinued to defy. When, however, he first entered upon 
those public readings, by persisting in which he indisputa- 
bly hastened his end, neither he nor his friends took into 
account the fear of bodily ill-effects resulting from his ex- 
ertions. Their misgivings had other grounds. Of course, 
had there been any pressure of pecuniary difficulty or need 
upon Dickens when he began, or when on successive occa- 
sions he resumed, his public readings, there would be noth- 
ing further to be said. But I see no suggestion of any 
such pressure. " My worldly circumstances," he wrote be- 
fore he had finally made up his mind to read in America, 
" are very good. I don't want money. All my posses- 
sions are free and in the best order. Still," he added, " at 
fifty-five or fifty-six, the likelihood of making a very great 
addition to one's capital in half a year is an immense con- 
sideration." Moreover, with all his love of doing as he 
chose, and his sense of the value of such freedom to him 
as a writer, he was a man of simple though liberal habits 
of life, with no taste for the gorgeous or capricious ex- 



chap, vi.] LAST YEARS. 147 

travagances of a Balzac or a Dumas, nor can he have been 
at a loss how to make due provision for those whom in 
the course of nature «he would leave behind him. Love of 
money for its own sake, or for that of the futilities it can 
purchase, was altogether foreign to his nature. At the 
same time, the rapid making of large sums has potent at- 
tractions for most men ; and these attractions are perhaps 
strongest for those who engage in the pursuit for the sake 
of the race as well as of the prize. Dickens's readings 
were virtually something new ; their success was not only 
all his own, but unique and unprecedented — what nobody 
but himself ever had achieved or ever could have achieved. 
Yet the determining motive — if I read his nature rightly 
— was, after all, of another kind. "Two souls dwelt in 
his breast;" and when their aspirations united in one ap- 
peal it was irresistible. The author who craved for the 
visible signs of a sympathy responding to that which he 
felt for his multitudes of readers, and the actor who longed 
to impersonate creations already beings of flesh and blood 
to himself, were both astir in him, and in both capacities 
he felt himself drawn into the very publicity deprecated 
by his friends. He liked, as one who knew him thorough- 
ly said to me, to be face to face with his public ; and 
against this liking, which he had already indulged as fully 
as he could without passing the boundaries between private 
and professional life, arguments were in vain. It has been 
declared sheer pedantry to speak of such boundaries ; and 
to suggest that there is anything degrading in paid read- 
ings such as those of Dickens would, on the face of it, be 
absurd. On the other hand, the author who, on or off the 
stage, becomes the interpreter of his writings to large 
audiences, more especially if he does his best to stereotype 
his interpretation by constantly repeating it, limits his own 



148 DICKENS. [chap. 

prerogative of being many things to many men ; and 
where the author of a work, more particularly of a work 
of fiction, adjusts it to circumstances differing from those 
of its production, he allows the requirements of the lesser 
art to prejudice the claims of the greater. 

Dickens cannot have been blind to these considerations ; 
but to others his eyes were never opened. He found 
much that was inspiriting in his success as a reader, and 
this not only in the large sums he gained, or even in the 
" roaring sea of response," to use his own fine metaphor, 
of which he had become accustomed to " stand upon the 
beach." His truest sentiment as an author was touched 
to the quick ; and he was, as he says himself, " brought 
very near to what he had sometimes dreamed might be 
his fame," when, at York, a lady, whose face he had never 
seen, stopped him in the street, and said to him, " Mr. 
Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled my 
house with many friends ?" or when, at Belfast, he was al- 
most overwhelmed with entreaties " to shake hands, Mis- 
ther Dickens, and God bless you, sir; not ounly for the 
light you've been in mee house, sir — and God love your 
face ! — this many a year." On the other hand — and this, 
perhaps, a nature like his would not be the quickest to 
perceive — there was something vulgarising in the constant 
striving after immediate success in the shape of large au- 
diences, loud applause, and satisfactory receipts. The con- 
ditions of the actor's art cannot forego these stimulants; 
and this is precisely his disadvantage in comparison with 
artists who are able to possess themselves in quiet. To 
me, at least, it is painful to find Dickens jubilantly record- 
ing how at Dublin " eleven bank-notes were thrust into 
the pay-box — Arthur saw them — at one time for eleven 
stalls ;" how at Edinburgh " neither Grisi, nor Jenny Lind," 



VI.] LAST YEARS. 149 

nor anything, nor anybody, seems to make the least effect 
on the draw of the readings ;" while, every allowance be- 
ing made, there is something almost ludicrous in the dou- 
ble assertion, that " the most delicate audience I had ever 
seen in any provincial place is Canterbury ; but the audi- 
ence with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover." 
What subjects for parody Dickens would have found in 
these innocent ecstasies if uttered by any other man ! 
Undoubtedly, this enthusiasm was closely connected with 
the very thoroughness with which he entered into the 
work of his readings. "You have no idea," he tells Fors- 
ter, in 1867, "how I have worked at them. Finding it 
necessary, as their reputation widened, that they should be 
better than at first, / have learnt them all, so as to have no 
mechanical drawback in looking after the words. I have 
tested all the serious passion in them by everything I 
know; made the humorous points much more humorous; 
corrected my utterance of certain words; cultivated a self- 
possession not to be disturbed ; and made myself master 
of the situation." " From ten years ago to last night," he 
writes to his son from Baltimore in 1868, "I have never 
read to an audience but I have watched for an opportunity 
of striking out something better somewhere." The fresh- 
ness with which he returned night after night and season 
after season to the sphere of his previous successes, was 
itself a genuine actor's gift. " So real," he declares, " are 
my fictions to myself, that, after hundreds of nights, I 
come with a feeling of perfect freshness to that little red 
table, and laugh and cry with my hearers as if I had never 
stood there before." 

Dickens's first public readings were given at Birming- 
ham, during the Christmas week of 1853 -'54, in sup- 
port of the new Midland Institute; but a record — for the 



150 DICKENS. [chap. 

authenticity of which I cannot vouch — remains, that with 
true theatrical instinct he, before the Christmas in ques- 
tion, gave a trial reading; of the Christmas Carol to a 
smaller public audience at Peterborough. He had since 
been repeatedly found willing to read for benevolent pur- 
poses ; and the very fact that it had become necessary to 
decline some of these frequent invitations had again sug- 
gested the possibility — which had occurred to him eleven 
years before — of meeting the demand in a different way. 
Yet it may, after all, be doubted whether the idea of un- 
dertaking an entire series of paid public readings would 
have been carried out, had it not been for the general rest- 
lessness which had seized upon Dickens early in 1858, 
when, moreover, he had no special task either of labour or 
of leisure to absorb him, and when he craved for excite- 
ment more than ever. To go home — in this springtime 
of 1858 — was not to find there the peace of contentment. 
" I must do something," he wrote in March to his faithful 
counsellor, " or I shall wear my heart away. I can see no 
better thing to do that is half so hopeful in itself, or half 
so well suited to my restless state." 

So by April the die was cast, and on the 29th of that 
month he had entered into his new relation with the pub- 
lic. One of the strongest and most genuine impulses of 
his, nature had victoriously asserted itself, and according 
to his wont he addressed himself to his task with a relent- 
less vigour which flinched from no exertion. He began 
with a brief series at St. Martin's Hall, and then, his inval- 
uable friend Arthur Smith continuing to act as his man- 
ager, he contrived to cram not less than eighty-seven read- 
ings into three months and a half of travelling in the 
" provinces," including Scotland and Ireland. A few win- 
ter readings in London, and a short supplementary course 



vi. J I -AST YEARS. 1SJ 

in the country during October, 1859, completed this first 
series. Already, in 1858, we find him, in a letter from 
Ireland, complaining of the "tremendous strain," and de- 
claring, " I seem to be always either in a railway carriage, 
or reading, or going to bed. I get so knocked up, when- 
ever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to 
bed as a matter of course." But the enthusiasm which 
everywhere welcomed him — I can testify to the thrill of 
excitement produced by his visit to Cambridge, in Octo- 
ber, 1859 — repaid him for his fatigues. Scotland thawed 
to him, and with Dublin — where his success was extraor- 
dinary — he was so smitten as to think it at first sight 
" pretty nigh as big as Paris." In return, the Boots at 
Morrison's expressed the general feeling in a patriotic 
point of view: "'Whaat sart of a hoose, sur?' he asked 
me. ' Capital.' ' The Lard be praised, for the 'onor o' 
Dooblin.' " 

The books, or portions of books, to which he confined 
himself during this first series of readings were few in 
number. They comprised the Carol and the Chimes, and 
two stories from earlier Christmas numbers of Household 
Words — may the exclamation of the soft-hearted chamber- 
maid at the Holly Tree Inn, "It's a shame to part 'em !" 
never vanish from my memory ! — together with the ep'v 
sodic readings of the Trial in Pickwick, Mrs. Gamp, and 
Paul Dombey. Of these the Pickwick, which I heard 
more than once, is still vividly present to me. The only 
drawback to the complete enjoyment of it was the lurking 
fear that there had been some tampering with tho text, 
not to be condoned even in its author. But in the way 
of assumption Charles Mathews the elder himself could 
have accomplished no more Protean effort, The lack- 
lustre eye of Mr. Justice Stareleigh, the forensic hitch of 



152 DICKENS. [chap. 

Mr. Serjeant Bnzfuz, and the hopeless impotence of Mr. 
Nathaniel Winkle were alike incomparable. And if the 
success of the impersonation of Mr. Samuel Weller was 
less complete — although Dickens had formerly acted the 
character on an amateur stage — the reason probably was 
that, by reason of his endless store of ancient and modern 
instances, Sam had himself become a quasi-mythical being, 
whom it was almost painful to find reproduced in flesh 
and blood. 

I have not hesitated to treat these readings by Dickens 
as if they had been the performances of an actor ; and the 
description would apply even more strongly to his later 
readings, in which he seemed to make his points in a more 
accentuated fashion than before. " His readings," says 
Mr. C. Kent, in an interesting little book about them, 
" were, in the fullest meaning of the words, singularly in- 
genious and highly -elaborated histrionic performances." 
As such they had been prepared with a care such as few 
actors bestow upon their parts, and — for the book was pre- 
pared not less than the reading — not all authors bestow 
upon their plays. Now, the art of reading, even in the 
case of dramatic works, has its own laws, which even the 
most brilliant readers cannot neglect except at their peril. 
A proper pitch has to be found, in the first instance, be- 
fore the exceptional passages can be, as it were, marked 
off from it; and the absence of this ground-tone some- 
times interfered with the total effect of a reading by Dick- 
ens. On the other hand, the exceptional passages were, if 
not uniformly, at least generally excellent ; nor am I at all 
disposed to agree with Forster in preferring, as a rule, the 
humorous to the pathetic. At the same time, there was 
noticeable in these readings a certain hardness which com- 
petent critics likewise discerned in Dickens's acting, and 



t:.] LAST YKAKS. 103 

which could not, at least in the former case, be regarded 
as an ordinary characteristic of dilettanteisra. The truth 
is that he isolated his parts too sharply — a frequent 
fault of English acting, and one more detrimental to 
the total effect of a reading than even to that of an acted 
play. 

No sooner had the heaviest stress of the first series of 
readings ceased than Dickens was once more at work 
upon a new fiction. The more immediate purpose was 
to insure a prosperous launch to the journal which, in the 
spring of 1859, took the place of Household Words. A 
dispute, painful in its origin, but ending in an amicable 
issue, had resulted in the purchase of that journal by 
Dickens ; but already a little earlier he had — as he was 
entitled to do — begun the new venture of All the Year 
Hound, with which Household Words was afterwards in- 
corporated. The first number, published on April 30, 
contained the earliest instalment of A Tale of Two Cities, 
which was completed by November 20 following. 

This story holds a unique place amongst the Actions of 
its author. Perhaps the most striking difference between 
it and his other novels may seem to lie in the all but entire 
absence from it of any humour or attempt at humour; for 
neither the brutalities of that " honest tradesman," Jerry, 
nor the laconisms of Miss Pross, can well be called by that 
name. Not that his sources of humour were drying up, 
even though, about this time, he contributed to an Ameri- 
can journal a short " romance of the real world," Hunted 
Down, from which the same relief is again conspicuously 
absent. For the humour of Dickens was to assert itself 
with unmistakable force in his next longer fiction, and was 
even before that, in some of his occasional papers, to give 
delightful proofs of its continued vigour. In the case of 



154 DICKENS. [chap. 

the Tale of Two Cities, he had a new and distinct design 
in his mind which did not, indeed, exclude humour, but 
with which a liberal indulgence in it must have seriously 
interfered. " I set myself," he writes, " the little task of 
writing a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with 
characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should 
express more than they should express themselves by dia- 
logue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of 
incident might be written, in place of the bestiality that is 
written under that pretence, pounding the characters out 
in its own mortar, and beating their own interests out of 
them." He therefore renounced his more usual method in 
favour of one probably less congenial to him. Yet, in his 
own opinion at least, he succeeded so well in the under- 
taking, that when the story was near its end he could vent- 
ure to express a hope that it was " the best story he had 
written." So much praise will hardly be given to this 
novel even by admirers of the French art of telling a story 
succinctly, or by those who can never resist a rather hys- 
terical treatment of the French Revolution. 

In my own opinion A Tale of Two Cities is a skilfully 
though not perfectly constructed novel, which needed but 
little substantial alteration in order to be converted into 
a not less effective stage-play. And with such a design 
Dickens actually sent the proof-sheets of the book to his 
friend Regnier, in the fearful hope that he might approve 
of the project of its dramatisation for a French theatre. 
Cleverly or clumsily adapted, the tale of the Revolution 
and its sanguinary vengeance was unlikely to commend 
itself to the Imperial censorship ; but an English version 
was, I believe, afterwards very fairly successful on the 
boards of the Adelphi, where Madame Celeste was cer- 
tainly in her right place as Madame Defarge, an excellent 



vi.] LAST YEARS. 155 

character for a melodrama, .though rather wearisome as 
she lies in wait through half a novel. 

The construction of this story is, as I have said, skilful 
but not perfect. Dickens himself successfully defended 
his use of accident in bringing about the death of Ma- 
dame Defarge. The real objection to the conduct of this 
episode, however, lies in the inadequacy of the contrivance 
for leaving Miss Pross behind in Paris. Too much is also, 
I think, made to turn upon the three words " and their 
descendants" — non-essential in the original connexion — by 
which Dr. Manette's written denunciation becomes fatal to 
those he loves. Still, the general' edifice of the plot is solid ; 
its interest is, notwithstanding the crowded background, 
concentrated with much skill upon a small group of person- 
ages ; and Carton's self-sacrifice, admirably prepared from 
the very first, produces a legitimate tragic effect. At the 
same time the novelist's art vindicates its own claims. Not 
only does this story contain several narrative episodes of 
remarkable power — such as the flight from Paris at the 
close, and the touching little incident of the seamstress, 
told in Dickens's sweetest pathetic manner — but it is like- 
wise enriched by some descriptive pictures of unusual ex- 
cellence : for instance, the sketch of Dover in the good 
old smuggling times, and the mezzo -tint of the stormy 
evening in Soho. Doubtless the increased mannerism of 
the style is disturbing, and this not only in the high-strung 
French scenes. As to the historical element in this novel, 
Dickens modestly avowed his wish that he might by his 
story have been able " to add something to the popular 
and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, 
though no one can hope to add anything to Mr. Carlyle's 
wonderful book." But if Dickens desired to depict the 
noble of the ancien regime, cither according to Carlyle or 



156 DICKENS. [chap. 

according to intrinsic probability, he should not have of- 
fered, in his Marquis, a type historically questionable, and 
unnatural besides. The description of the Saint Antoinc, 
before and during the bursting of the storm, has in it more 
of truthfulness, or of the semblance of truthfulness; and 
Dickens's perception of the physiognomy of the French 
workman is, I think, remarkably accurate. Altogether, 
the book is an extraordinary tour de force, which Dickens 
never repeated. 

The opening of a new story by Dickens gave the neces- 
sary impetus to his new journal at its earliest stage; nor 
was the ground thus gained ever lost. Mr. W. H. Wills 
stood by his chief's side as of old, taking, more especially 
in later years, no small share of responsibility upon him. 
The prospectus of All the Year Round had not in vain 
promised an identity of principle in its conduct with that 
of its predecessor; in energy and spirit it showed no 
falling off ; and, though not in all respects, the personality 
of Dickens made itself felt as distinctly as ever. Besides 
the Tale of Two Cities he contributed to it his story of 
Qreat Expectations. Amongst his contributors Mr. Wilkie 
Collins took away the breath of multitudes of readers ; 
Mr. Charles Reade disported himself amongst the facts 
which gave stamina to his fiction ; and Lord Lytton made 
a daring voyage into a mysterious country. Thither 
Dickens followed him, for once, in his Four Stories, not 
otherwise noteworthy, and written in a manner already 
difficult to discriminate from that of Mr. Wilkie Collins. 
For the rest, the advice with which Dickens aided Lord 
Lytton's progress in his Strange Story was neither more 
ready nor more painstaking than that which he bestowed 
upon his younger contributors, to more than one of whom 
he generously gave the opportunity of publishing in his 



vi.] LAST YEARS. til 

journal a long work of fiction. Some of these younger 
writers were at this period amongst his most frequent 
guests and associates ; for nothing more naturally com- 
mended itself to him than the encouragement, of the 
younger generation. 

But though longer imaginative works played at least as 
conspicuous a part in the new journal as they had in the 
ofd, the conductor likewise continued to make manifest 
his intention that the lesser contributions should not be 
treated by readers or by writers as harmless necessary 
" padding." For this purpose it was requisite not only 
that the choice of subjects should be made with the ut- 
most care, but also that the master's hand should itself be 
occasionally visible. Dickens's occasional contributions 
had been few and unimportant, till in a happy hour he 
began a scries of papers, including many of the pleasant- 
est, as well as of the mellowest, amongst the lighter pro- 
ductions of his pen. As usual, he had taken care to find 
for this series a name which of itself went far to make its 
fortune. 

" I am both a town and a country traveller, and am always on the 
road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human 
Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connexion in the fancy 
goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and 
there from my rooms in Covent Garden, London — now about the 
city streets, now .about the country by - roads, seeing many little 
things, and some great things, which, because they interest ra6, I 
think may interest others." 

The whole collection of these Uncommercial Traveller 
papers, together with the Uncommercial Samples which 
succeeded them after Dickens's return from America, and 
which begin with a graphic account of his homeward voy- 
age Aboard Ship, where the voice of conscience spoke in 



158 DICKENS. [chap. 

the motion of the screw, amounts to thirty-seven articles, 
and spreads over a period of nine years. They are neces- 
sarily of varying merit, but amongst them are some which 
deserve a permanent place in our lighter literature. Such 
are the description of the church-yards on a quiet evening 
in The City of the Absent, the grotesque picture of loneli- 
ness in Chambers — a favourite theme with Dickens — and 
the admirable papers on Shy Neighbourhoods and on 
Tramps. Others have a biographical interest, though 
delightfully objective in treatment ; yet others are mere 
fugitive pieces; but there are few without some of the 
most attractive qualities of Dickens's easiest style. 

Dickens contributed other occasional papers to his jour- 
nal, some of which may be forgotten without injury to his 
fame. Amongst these may be reckoned the rather dreary 
George Silverman's Explanation (1868)-, in which there is 
nothing characteristic but a vivid picture of a set of rant- 
ers, led by a clique of scoundrels ; on the other hand, there 
will always be admirers of the pretty Holiday Romance, 
published nearly simultaneously in America and England, 
a nosegay of tales told by children, the only fault of which 
is that, as with other children's nosegays, there is perhaps 
a little too much of it. I have no room for helping to 
rescue from partial oblivion an old friend, whose portrait 
has not, I think, found a home amongst his master's collect- 
ed sketches. lyncher's counterfeit has gone astray, like 
Pincher himself. Meanwhile, the special institution of 
the Christmas number flourished in connexion with All 
the Year Round down to the year 1867, as it had during 
the last five years of Household Words. It consisted, with 
the exception of the very last number, of a series of short 
stories, in a framework of the editor's own devising. To 
the authors of the stories, of which he invariably himself 



vi.] LAST YEARS. 159 

wrote one or more, he left the utmost liberty, at times 
stipulating for nothing but that tone of cheerful philan- 
thropy which he had domesticated in his journal. In the 
Christmas numbers, which gradually attained to such a 
popularity that of one of the last something like a quarter 
of a million copies were sold, Dickens himself shone most 
conspicuously in the introductory sections ; and some of 
these are to be reckoned amongst his very best descriptive 
character-sketches. Already in Household Words Christ- 
mas numbers the introductory sketch of the Seven Poor 
Travellers from Watt's Charity at supper in the Rochester 
hostelry, and the excellent description of a winter journey 
and sojourn at the Holly Tree Inn, with an excursus on 
inns in general, had become widely popular. The All the 
Year Round numbers, however, largely augmented this 
success. After Tom Tiddler 's Ground, with the advent- 
ures of Miss Kitty Kimmeens, a pretty little morality in 
miniature, teaching the same lesson as the vagaries of Mr. 
Mopes the hermit, came Somebody' 's Luggage, with its ex- 
haustive disquisition on waiters ; and then the memorable 
chirpings of Mrs. Lirri])er, in both Lodgings and Legacy, 
admirable in the delicacy of their pathos, and including an 
inimitable picture of London lodging-house life. Then 
followed the Prescriptions of Dr. Marigold, the eloquent 
and sarcastic but tender-hearted Cheap Jack ; and Mughy 
Junction, which gave words to the cry of a whole nation 
of hungry and thirsty travellers. In the tales and sketches 
contributed by him to the Christmas numbers, in addition 
to these introductions, he at times gave the rein to his love 
for the fanciful and the grotesque, which there was here 
no reason to keep under. On the whole, written, as in a 
sense these compositions were, to order, nothing is more 
astonishing in them than his continued freshness, against 



1G0 DICKENS. [chap. 

which his mannerism is here of vanishing importance ; 
and, inasmuch as after issuing a last Christmas number of 
a different kind, Dickens abandoned the custom when it 
had readied the height of popular favour, and when man- 
ifold imitations had offered him the homage of their flat- 
tery, he may be said to have withdrawn from this cam- 
paign in his literary life with banners flying. 

In the year 1859 Dickens's readings had been compar- 
atively few ; and they had ceased altogether in the follow- 
ing year, when the Uncommercial Traveller began his 
wanderings. The winter from 1859 to 1860 was his last 
winter at Tavistock House ; and, with the exception of his 
rooms in Wellington Street, he had now no settled resi- 
dence but Gad's Hill Place. He sought its pleasant re- 
treat about the beginning of June, after the new experience 
of an attack of rheumatism had made him recognise "the 
necessity of country training all through the summer." 
Yet such was the recuperative power, or the indomitable 
self-confidence, of his nature, that after he had in these 
summer months contributed some of the most delightful 
Uncommercial Traveller papers to his journal, we find him 
already in August " prowling about, meditating a new 
book." 

It is refreshing to think of Dickens in this pleasant 
interval of country life, before he had rushed once more 
into the excitement of his labours as a public reader. We 
may picture him to ourselves, accompanied by his dogs, 
striding along the country roads and lanes, exploring the 
haunts of the country tramps, " a piece of Kentish road," for 
instance, " bordered on either side by a wood, and having 
on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a skirt- 
ing patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on 
this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant river 



vi] LAST YEARS. 161 

stealing steadily away to the ocean like a man's life. To 
gain the mile-stone here, which the moss, primroses, vio- 
lets, bluebells, and wild roses would soon render illegible 
but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their 
sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way 
you may." At the foot of that bill, I fancy, lay Dull- 
borough town half asleep in the summer afternoon; and 
the river in the distance was that which bounded the 
horizon of a little boy's vision " whose father's family 
name was Pirrip, and whose Christian name was Philip, 
but whoso infant tongue could make of both names noth- 
ing longer or more explicit than Pip." 

The story of Pip's adventures, the novel of Great Ex- 
pectations, was thought over in these Kentish perambula- 
tions between Thames and Medway along the road which 
runs, apparently with the intention of running out to sea, 
from Higham towards the marshes ; in the lonely church- 
yard of Cooling village by the thirteen little stone - loz- 
enges, of which Pip counted only five, now nearly buried in 
their turn by the rank grass ; and in quiet saunters through 
the familiar streets of Rochester, past the " queer " Town- 
hall ; and through the " Vines " past the fine old Restora- 
tion House, called in the book (by the name of an alto- 
gether different edifice) Satis House. And the climax of 
the narrative was elaborated on a unique steamboat excur- 
sion from London to the mouth of the Thames, broken by 
a night at the " Ship and Lobster," an old riverside inn call- 
ed "The Ship" in the story. No wonder that Dickens's 
descriptive genius should become refreshed by these studies 
of his subject, and that thus Great Expectations should have 
indisputably become one of the most picturesque of his 
books. But it is something very much more at the same 
time. The Tale of Two Cities had as a story strongly 
8 



102 DICKENS. [chap. 

seized upon the attention of the reader. But in the earlier 
chapters of Great Expectations every one felt that Dickens 
was himself again. Since the Yarmouth scenes in David 
Copperfield he had written nothing in which description 
married itself to sentiment so humorously and so tender- 
ly. Uncouth, and slow, and straightforward, and gentle 
of heart, like Mr. Peggotty, Joe Gargery is as new a con- 
ception as he is a genuinely true one ; nor is it easy to 
know under what aspect to relish him most — whether dis- 
consolate in his Sunday clothes, " like some extraordinary 
bird, standing, as he did, speechless, with his tuft of feath- 
ers ruffled, and his mouth open as if he wanted a worm," or 
at home by his own fireside, winking at his little comrade, 
and, when caught in the act by his wife, "drawing the back 
of his hand across his nose with his usual conciliatory 
air on such occasions." Nor since David Copperfield had 
Dickens again shown such an insight as he showed here 
into the world of a child's mind. " To be quite sure," he 
wrote to Forster, " I had fallen into no unconscious repe- 
titions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and 
was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe." 
His fears were unnecessary ; for with all its charm the 
history of Pip lacks -the personal element which insures 
our sympathy to the earlier story and to its hero. In 
delicacy of feeling, however, as well as in humour of de- 
scription, nothing in Dickens surpasses the earlier chap- 
ters of Great Expectations ; and equally excellent is the 
narrative of Pip's disloyalty of heart toward his early 
friends, down to his departure from the forge, a picture 
of pitiable selfishness almost Rousseau-like in its fidelity 
to poor human nature; down to his comic humiliation, 
when in the pride of his new position and his new clothes, 
before "that unlimited miscreant, Trabb's boy." The 



VI.] LAST YEARS. 168 

later and especially the concluding portions of this novel 
contain much that is equal in power to its opening; but 
it must be allowed that, before many chapters have ended, 
a false tone finds its way into the story. The whole his- 
tory of Miss Havisham, and the crew of relations round 
the unfortunate creature, is strained and unnatural, and 
Estella's hardness is as repulsive as that of Edith Dombey 
herself. Mr, Jaggers and his house- keeper, and even Mr. 
Weinmick, have an element of artificiality in them, whilst 
about the Pocket family there is little, if anything at all, 
that is real. The story, however, seems to recover itself 
as the main thread in its deftly-woven texture is brought 
forward again : when on a dark, gusty night, ominous of 
coming trouble, the catastrophe of Pip's expectations an- 
nounces itself in the return from abroad of his unknown 
benefactor, the convict whom he had as a child fed on the 
marshes. The remainder of the narrative is successful in 
conveying to the reader the sense of sickening anxiety 
which fills the hero ; the interest is skilfully sustained by 
the introduction of a very strong situation — Pip's narrow 
escape out of the clutches of " Old Orlick " in the lime-kiln 
on the marshes; and the climax is reached in the* admi- 
rably-executed narrative of the convict's attempt, with the 
aid of Pip, to escape by the river. The actual winding- 
up of Great Expectations is not altogether satisfactory; 
but on the whole the book must be ranked among the 
very best of Dickens's later novels, as combining, with the 
closer construction and intenser narrative force common 
to several of these, not a little of the delightfully genial 
humour of his earlier works. 

Already, before Great Expectations was completely pub- 
lished, Dickens had given a few readings at the St. James's 
Hall, and by the end of October in the same year, 1861, 



164 DICKENS. [ctiap. 

he was once more engaged in a full course of country 
readings. They occupied him till the following January, 
only ten days being left for his Christmas number, and 
a brief holiday for Christmas itself; so close was the ad- 
justment of time and work by this favourite of fortune. 
The death of his faithful Arthur Smith befell most unto- 
wardly before the country readings were begun, but their 
success was unbroken, from Scotland to South Devon. 
The long-contemplated extract from Coppcrfield had at 
last been added to the list — a self-sacrifice coram ]mblico, 
hallowed by success — and another from Nicholas Nickleby, 
which " went in the wildest manner." He was, however, 
nearly worn out with fatigue before these winter readings 
were over, and was glad to snatch a moment of repose 
before a short spring course in town began. Scarcely was 
this finished, when he was coquetting in his mind with an 
offer from Australia, and had already proposed to himself 
to throw in, as a piece of work by the way, a series of 
papers to be called The Uncommercial Traveller Upside 
Down. Meanwhile, a few readings for a charitable pur- 
pose in Paris, and a short summer course at St. James's 
Hall, completed this second scries in the year 1863. 

Whatever passing thoughts overwork by day or sleep- 
lessness at night may have occasionally brought with 
them, Dickens himself would have been strangely sur- 
prised, as no doubt would have been the great body of a 
public to which he was by this time about the best known 
man in England, had he been warned that weakness and 
weariness were not to be avoided even by a nature en- 
dowed with faculties so splendid and with an energy so 
conquering as his. He seemed to stand erect in the 
strength of his matured powers, equal as of old to any 
task which he set himself, and exulting, though with less 



vi. I LAST YEARS. 165 

buoyancy of spirit than of old, in the wreaths which con- 
tinued to strew his path. Yet already the ranks of his 
contemporaries were growing thinner, while close to him- 
self death was taking away members of the generation 
before, and of that after, his own. Amongst them was his 
mother — of whom his biography and his works have little 
to say or to suggest — and his second son. Happy events, 
too, had in the due course of things contracted the family 
circle at Gad's Hill. Of his intimates, he lost, in 18G3, 
Augustus Egg; and in 1864 John Leech, to whose genius 
he had himself formerly rendered eloquent homage. 

A still older associate, the great painter Stanfield, sur- 
vived till 1867. " No one of your father's friends," Dick- 
ens then wrote to Stan field's son, " can ever have loved him 
more dearly than I always did, or can have better known 
the worth of his noble character." Yet another friend, 
who, however, so far as I can gather, had not at any time 
belonged to Dickens's most familiar circle, had died on 
Christmas Eve, 1863 — Thackeray, whom it had for some 
time become customary to compare or contrast with him 
as his natural rival. Yet in point of fact, save for the 
tenderness which, as with all humourists of the highest or- 
der, was an important element in their writings, and save 
for the influences of time and country to which they were 
both subject, there are hardly two other amongst our great 
humourists who have less in common. Their unlikcness 
shows itself, among other things, in the use made by 
Thackeray of suggestions wliich it is difficult to believe he 
did not in the first instance owe to Dickens. Who would 
venture to call Captain Costigan a plagiarism from Mr. 
Snevellici, or to affect that Wenham and Wagg were copied 
from Pyke and Pluck, or that Major Pendennis — whose 
pardon one feels inclined to beg for the juxtaposition — . 



166 DICKENS. [chap. 

was founded upon Major Bagstock, or the Old Campaigner 
in the Neivcomcs on the Old Soldier in Copperfield? But 
that suggestions were in these and perhaps in a few other 
instances derived from Dickens by Thackeray for some of 
his most masterly characters, it would, I think, be idle to 
deny. In any case, the style of these two great writers 
differed as profoundly as their way of looking at men and 
things. Yet neither of them lacked a thorough apprecia- 
tion of the other's genius; and it is pleasant to remember 
that, after paying in Pendennis a tribute to the purity of 
Dickens's books, Thackeray in a public lecture referred to 
his supposed rival in a way which elicited from the latter 
the warmest of acknowledgments. It cannot be said that 
the memorial words which, after Thackeray's death, Dick- 
ens was prevailed upon to contribute to the Comhill Mag- 
azine did more than justice to the great writer whom Eng- 
land had just lost; but it is well that the kindly and un- 
stinting tribute of admiration should remain on record, 
to contradict any supposition that a disagreement which 
had some years previously disturbed the harmony of their 
intercourse, and of which the world had, according to its 
wont, made the most, had really estranged two generous 
minds from one another. The effort which on this occa- 
sion Dickens made is in itself a proof of his kindly feeling 
towards Thackeray. Of Talfourd and Landor and Stan- 
field he could write readily after their deaths, but he frank- 
ly told Mr. Wilkie Collins that, " had he felt he could," he 
would most gladly have excused himself from writing the 
" couple of pages " about Thackeray. 

Dickens, it should be remembered, was at no time a 
man of many friends. The mere dalliance of friendship 
was foreign to one who worked so indefatigably in his 
hours of recreation as well as of labour; and fellowship 



ti.] LAST YEARS. 167 

in work of one kind or another seems to have been, in 
later years at all events, the surest support to his intimacy. 
Yet he was most easily drawn, not only to those who 
could help him, but to those whom he could help in con- 
genial pursuits and undertakings. Such was, no doubt, 
the origin of his friendship in these later years with an 
accomplished French actor on the English boards, whom, 
in a rather barren period of our theatrical history, Dickens 
may have been justified in describing as "far beyond any 
one on our stage," and who certainly was an " admirable 
artist." In 1864 Mr. Fechter had taken the Lyceum, the 
management of which he was to identify with a more ele- 
gant kind of melodrama than that long domesticated 
lower down the Strand ; and Dickens was delighted to 
bestow on him counsel frankly sought and frankly given. 
As an author, too, he directly associated himself with the 
art of his friend. 1 For I may mention here by anticipa- 
tion that the last of the All the Year Hound Christmas 
numbers, the continuous story of No Thoroughfare, was 
written by Dickens and Mr. Wilkie Collins in 1867, with 
a direct eye to its subsequent adaptation to the stage, for 
which it actually was fitted by Mr. Wilkie Collins in the 
following year. The place of its production, the Adelphi, 
suited the broad effects and the rather conventional comic 
humour of the story and piece. From America, Dickens 

1 One of tlie last things ever written by Dickens was a criticism 
of M. Fechter's acting, intended to introduce him to the American 
public. A false report, by-the-way, declared Dickens to have been 
the author of the dramatic version of Scott's novel, which at Christ- 
mas, 1865-'66, was produced at the Lyceum, under the title of The 
Master of Ravenswood ; but he allowed that he had done "a great 
dr;il towards and about the piece, having an earnest desire to put 
Scott, for once, on the stage in his own gallant manner." 



168 DICKENS. [chap. 

watched the preparation of the piece with unflagging in- 
terest ; and his innate and irrepressible genius for stage- 
management reveals itself in the following passage from 
a letter written by him to an American friend soon after 
bis return to England : "No Thoroughfare is very shortly 
coming out in Paris, where it is now in active rehearsal. 
It is still playing here, but without Fcchter, who has been 
very ill. He and Wilkie raised so many pieces of stage- 
effect here, that, unless I am quite satisfied with the re- 
port, I shall go over and try my stage-managerial hand at 
the Vaudeville Theatre. I particularly want the drugging 
and attempted robbery in the bedroom-scene at the Swiss 
Inn to be done to the sound of a water-fall rising and fall- 
ing with the wind. Although in the very opening of that 
scene they speak of the water-fall, and listen to it, nobody 
thought of its mysterious music. I could make it, with a 
good stage-carpenter, in an hour." 

Great Expectations had been finished in 1860, and al- 
ready in the latter part of 1861, the year which comprised 
the main portion of his second series of readings, he had 
been thinking of a new story. He had even found a title 
— the unlucky title which he afterwards adopted — but in 
1862 the tempting Australian invitation had been a seri- 
ous obstacle in his way. " I can force myself to go aboard 
a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk 
what I have done a hundred times; but whether, with all 
this unsettled, fluctuating distress in my mind, I could 
force an original book out of it is another question." Nor 
was it the "unsettled, fluctuating distress" which made it 
a serious effort for him to attempt another longer fiction. 
Dickens shared with most writers the experience that both 
the inventive power and the elasticity of memory decline 
with advancing years. Already since the time when he 



vi.] LAST YEARS. 169 

was thinking of writing Little Dorrit it bad become his 
habit to enter in a book kept for the purpose memoranda 
for possible future use, hints for subjects of stories, 1 
scenes, situations, and characters ; thoughts and fancies of 
all kinds ; titles for possible books. Of these Somebody's 
Luggage, Our Mutual Friend, and No Thoroughfare — 
the last an old fancy revived — came to honourable use ; as 
did many names, both Christian and surnames, and com- 
binations of both. Thus, Bradley Headstone's preenomen 
was derived directly from the lists of the Education De- 
partment, and the Lammles and the Stiltstalkings, with 
Mr. Merdle and the Dorrits, existed as names before the 
characters were fitted to them. All this, though no doubt 
in part attributable to the playful readiness of an observa- 
tion never to be caught asleep, points in the direction of a 
desire to be securely provided with an armoury of which, 
in earlier days, he would have taken slight thought. 

Gradually — indeed, so far as I know, more gradually than 
in the case of any other of his stories- — he had built up the 
tale for which he had determined on the title of Our Mut- 
ual Friend, and slowly, and without his old self-confidence, 
he had, in the latter part of 1863, set to work upon it. "I 
want to prepare it for the spring, but I am determined not 
to begin to publish with less than four numbers done. I 
sec my opening perfectly, with the one main line on which 
the story is to turn, and if I don't strike while the iron 
(meaning myself) is hot, I shall drift off again, and have 
to go through all this uneasiness once more." For, unfort- 
unately, he had resolved on returning to the old twenty- 
number measure for his new story. Begun with an effort, 

1 Dickens undoubtedly had a genius for titles. Amongst some 
which lie suggested fur the use of a friend and contributor to his 
journal arc, " What will he do with it?" and " Can he forgive her?" 



170 DICKENS. [chap. 

Our Mutual Friend — the publication of which extended 
from May, 1864, to November, 1865 — was completed un- 
der difficulties, and difficulties of a kind hitherto unknown 
to Dickens. In February, 1865, as an immediate conse- 
quence, perhaps, of exposure at a time when depression of 
spirits rendered him less able than usual to bear it, he had 
a severe attack of illness, of which Forster says that it " put 
a broad mark between his past life and what remained to 
him of the future." From this time forward he felt a 
lameness in his left foot, which continued to trouble him 
at intervals during the remainder of his life, and which 
finally communicated itself to the left hand. A comparison 
of times, however, convinced Forster that the real origin 
of this ailment was to be sought in general causes. 

In 1865, as the year wore on, and the pressure of the 
novel still continued, he felt that he was " working himself 
into a damaged state," and was near to that which has 
greater terrors for natures like his than for more placid 
temperaments — breaking down. So, in May, he went first 
to the sea-side and then to France. On his return (it was 
the 9th of June, the date of his death five years, afterwards) 
he was in the railway train which met with a fearful ac- 
cident at Staplehurst, in Kent. His carriage was the only 
passenger-carriage in the train which, when the bridge gave 
way, was not thrown over into the stream. He was able 
to escape out of the window, to make his way in again for 
his brandy-flask and the MS. of a number of Our Mutual 
Friend which he had left behind him, to clamber down 
the brickwork of the bridge for water, to do what he could 
towards rescuing his unfortunate fellow-travellers, and to 
aid the wounded and the dying. " I have," he wrote, in 
describing the scene, " a — I don't know what to call it : 
constitutional, I suppose — presence of mind, and was not 



vi.] LAST YEARS. 171 

in the least fluttered at the time. . . . But in writing these 
scanty words of recollection I feel the shake, and am obliged 
to stop." Nineteen months afterwards, when on a hurried 
reading tour in the North, he complains to Miss Hogarth 
of the effect of the railway shaking which since the Staple- 
hurst accident " tells more and more." It is clear how 
serious a shock the accident had caused. He never, Miss 
Hogarth thinks, quite recovered it. Yet it might have 
acted less disastrously upon a system not already nervously 
weakened. As evidence of the decline of Dickens's nervous 
power, I hardly know whether it is safe to refer to the 
gradual change in his handwriting, which in his last years 
is a melancholy study. 

All these circumstances should be taken into account in 
judging of Dickens's last completed novel. The author 
would not have been himself had he, when once fairly en- 
gaged upon his work, failed to feel something of his old 
self-confidence. Nor was this feeling, which he frankly 
confessed to Mr. Wilkie Collins, altogether unwarranted. 
Our Mutual Friend 1 is, like the rest of Dickens's later 
writings, carefully and skilfully put together as a story. 
No exception is to be taken to it on the ground that the 
identity on which much of the plot hinges is long fore- 
seen by the reader ; for this, as Dickens told his critics in 
his postscript, had been part of his design, and was, in 
fact, considering the general nature of the story, almost 
indispensable. The defect rather lies in the absence of 
that element of uncertainty which is needed in order to 

1 This title has helped to extinguish the phrase of which it con- 
sists. Few would now be found to agree with the last clause of Flo- 
ra's parenthesis in Little Dorrit: "Our mutual friend — too cold a 
word for me; at least 1 don't mean that very proper expression, 
niutual friend." 



172 DICKENS. [chap. 

sustain the interest. The story is, no doubt, ingeniously 
enough constructed, but admiration of an ingenious con- 
struction is insufficient to occupy the mind of a reader 
through an inevitable disentanglement. Moreover, some 
of the machinery, though cleverly contrived, cannot be 
said to work easily. Thus, the ruse of the excellent Bof- 
fin in playing the part of a skinflint might pass as a mo- 
mentary device, but its inherent improbability, together 
with the likelihood of its leading to an untoward result, 
makes its protraction undeniably tedious. It is not, how- 
ever, in my opinion at least, in the matter of construction 
that Our Mutual Friend presents a painful contrast with 
earlier works produced, like it, " on a large canvas." The 
conduct of the story as a whole is fully vigorous enough 
to enchain the attention ; and in portions of it the hand 
of the master displays its unique power. He is at his best 
in the whole of the water-side scenes, both where " The Six 
Jolly Fellowship Porters" (identified by zealous discoverers 
with a tavern called "The Two Brewers") lies like an oasis 
in the midst of a desert of ill-favoured tidal deposits, and 
where Rogue Uidcrhood has his lair at the lock higher up 
the river. A marvellous union of observation and imagi- 
nation was needed for the picturing of a world in which 
this amphibious monster has his being ; and never did 
Dickens's inexhaustible knowledge of the physiognomy of 
the Thames and its banks stand him in better stead than 
in these powerful episodes. It is unfortunate, though in 
accordance with the common fate of heroes and heroines, 
that Lizzie Hexham should, from the outset, have to dis- 
card the colouring of her surroundings, and to talk the 
conventional dialect as well as express the conventional 
sentiments of the heroic world. Only at the height of the 
action she ceases to be commonplace, and becomes entitled 



VI.] LAST YEARS. \1?> 

to be remembered amongst the true heroines of fiction. 
A more unusual figure, of the half-pathetic, half-grotesque 
kind for which Dickens had a peculiar liking, is Lizzie's 
friend, the doll's dressmaker, into whom he has certainly 
infused an element of genuine sentiment; her protector, 
Rial), on the contrary, is a mere stage-saint, though by this 
character Dickens appears to have actually hoped to re- 
deem the aspersions he was supposed to have cast upon 
the Jews, as if Riah could have redeemed Fagin, any 
more than Sheva redeemed Shylock. 

But in this book whole episodes and parts of the plot 
through which the mystery of John Harmon winds its 
length along are ill-adapted for giving pleasure to any 
reader. The whole Boffin, Wegg, and Venus business — if 
the term may pass — is extremely wearisome ; the character 
of Mr. Venus, in particular, seems altogether unconnected 
or nnarticulated with the general plot, on which, indeed, 
it is but an accidental excrescence. In the "Wilfer family 
there are the outlines of some figures of genuine humour, 
but the outlines only ; nor is Bella raised into the sphere 
of the charming out of that of the pert and skittish. A 
more ambitious attempt, and a more noteworthy failure, 
was the endeavour to give to the main plot of this novel 
such a satiric foil as the Circumlocution Office had furnish- 
ed to the chief action of Little Dorrit, in a caricature of 
society at large, its surface varnish and its internal rotten- 
ness. The Barnacles, and those who deemed it their duty 
to rally round the Barnacles, had, we saw, felt themselves 
hard hit ; but what sphere or section of society could 
feel itself specially caricatured in the Veneerings, or in 
their associates — the odious Lady Tippins, the impossibly 
brutal Podsnap, Fascination Fledgeby, and the Lammles, 
a couple which suggests nothing but antimony and the 



1U DICKENS. [chap. 

Chamber of Horrors? Caricature such as this, represent- 
ing no society that has ever in any part of the world pre- 
tended to he "good," corresponds to the wild rhetoric of 
the superfluous Betty Higden episode against the " gospel 
according to Podsnappery ;" but it is, in truth, satire from 
which both wit and humour have gone out. An angry, 
often almost spasmodic, mannerism has to supply their 
place. Amongst the personages moving in "society" arc 
two which, as playing serious parts in the progress of the 
plot, the author is necessarily obliged to seek to endow 
with the flesh and blood of real human beings. Yet it is 
precisely in these — the friends Eugene and Mortimer — 
that, in the earlier part of the novel at all events, the con- 
straint of the author's style seems least relieved ; the dia- 
logues between these two Templars have an unnaturalness 
about them as intolerable as euphuism or the effeminacies 
of the Augustan age. It is true that, when the story 
reaches its tragic height, the character of Eugene is borne 
along with it, and his affectations are forgotten. But in 
previous parts of the book, where he poses as a wit, and is 
evidently meant for a gentleman, he fails to make good 
his claims to either character. Even the skilfully contrived 
contrast between the rivals Eugene Wrayburn and the 
school - master, Bradley Headstone — through whom and 
through whose pupil, Dickens, by-the-way, dealt another 
blow against a system of mental training founded upon 
facts alone — fails to bring out the conception of Eugene 
which the author manifestly had in his mind. Lastly, the 
old way of reconciling dissonances — a marriage which 
" society " calls a mesalliance — has rarely furnished a 
lamer ending than here; and, had the unwritten laws 
of English popular fiction permitted, a tragic close 
would have better accorded with the sombre hue of 



vi.] LAST YEARS. 175 

the most powerful portions of this curiously unequal ro- 
mance. 

The effort — for such it was — of Our Mutual Friend 
had not been over for more than a few months, when 
Dickens accepted a proposal for thirty nights' readings 
from the Messrs. Chappell ; and by April, 1866, he was 
again hard at work, flying across the country into Lanca- 
shire and Scotland, and back to his temporary London 
residence in Southwick Place, Hyde Park. In any man 
more capable than Dickens of controlling the restlessness 
which consumed him the acceptance of this offer would 
have been incomprehensible; for his heart had been de- 
clared out of order by his physician, and the patient had 
shown himself in some degree awake to the significance 
of this opinion. But the readings were begun and accom- 
plished notwithstanding, though not without warnings, on 
which he insisted on putting his own interpretation. 
Sleeplessness aggravated fatigue, and stimulants were al- 
ready necessary to enable him to do the work of his readings 
without discomfort. Meanwhile, some weeks before they 
were finished, he had been induced to enter into negotia- 
tions about a further en<jao;ement to bemn at the end of 
the year. Time was to be left for the Christmas number, 
which this year could hardly find its scene anywhere else 
than at a railway junction ; and the readings were not to 
extend over forty nights, which seem ultimately to have 
been increased to fifty. This second series, which in- 
cluded a campaign in Ireland, brilliantly successful despite 
snow and rain, and Fenians, was over in May. Then came 
the climax, for America now claimed her share of the 
great author for her public halls and chapels and lecture- 
theatres ; and the question of the summer and autumn 
was whether or not to follow the sound of the distant 



176 DICKENS. [chap. 

dollar. It was closely debated between Dickens and his 
friend Forster and Wills, and he describes himself as 
" tempest-tossed " with doubts ; but his mind had inclined 
in one direction from the first, and the matter was virtu- 
ally decided when it resolved to send a confidential agent 
to make enquiries on the spot. Little imported another 
and grave attack in his foot ; the trusty Mr. Dolby's report 
was irresistible. Eighty readings within half a year was 
the estimated number, with profits amounting to over fif- 
teen thousand pounds. The gains actually made were 
nearly five thousand pounds in excess of this calculation. 

A farewell banquet, under the presidency of Lord Lyt- 
ton, gave the favourite author Godspeed on his journey 
to the larger half of his public ; on the 9th of November 
he sailed from Liverpool, and on the 19th landed at Bos- 
ton. The voyage, on which, with his old buoyancy, he 
had contrived to make himself master of the modest revels 
of the saloon, seems to have done him good, or at least to 
have made him, as usual, impatient to be at his task. 
Barely arrived, he is found reporting himself " so well, 
that I am constantly chafing at not having begun to-night, 
instead of this night week." By December, however, he 
was at his reading-desk, first at Boston, where he met 
with the warmest of welcomes, and then at New York, 
where there was a run upon the tickets, which he described 
with his usual excited delight. The enthusiasm of his re- 
ception by the American public must have been heighten- 
ed by the thought that it was now or never for them to 
see him face to face, and, by-goncs being by-gones, to tes- 
tify to him their admiration. But there may have been 
some foundation for his discovery that some signs of agi- 
tation on his part were expected in return, and " that it 
would have been taken as a suitable compliment if I would 

1 



vi.] LAST YEARS. Ill 

stagger on the platform, and instantly drop, overpowered 
by the spectacle before me." It was but a sad Christmas 
which he spent with his faithful Dolby at their New York 
inn, tired, and with a "genuine American catarrh upon 
him," of which he never freed himself during his stay in 
the country. Hardly had he left the doctor's hands than 
he was about again, reading in Boston and New York and 
their more immediate neighbourhood — that is, within six 
or seven hours by railway — till February; and then, in 
order to stimulate his public, beginning a series of appear- 
ances at more distant places before returning to his start- 
ing-points. His whole tour included, besides a number of 
New England towns, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Wash- 
ington, and in the north Cleveland and Buffalo. Canada 
and the West were struck out of the programme, the lat- 
ter chiefly because exciting political matters were begin- 
ning to absorb public attention. 

During these journeyings Dickens gave himself up alto- 
gether to the business of his readings, only occasionally 
allowing himself to accept the hospitality proffered him 
on every side. ' Thus only could he breast the difficulties 
of. his enterprise; for, as I have said, his health was never 
good during the whole of his visit, and his exertions were 
severe, though eased by the self-devotion of his attendants, 
of which, as of his constant kindness, both serious and 
sportive, towards them it is touching to read. Already in 
January he describes himself as not seldom " so dead beat" 
at the close of a reading. " that they lay me down on a 
sofa, after I have been washed and dressed, and I lie there, 
extremely faint, for a quarter of an hour," and as suffering 
from intolerable sleeplessness at night. His appetite was 
equally disordered, and he lived mainly on stimulants. 
Why had he condemned himself to such a life? 



178 DICKENS. [chap. 

When at last he could declare the stress of his work 
over he described himself as " nearly used up. Climate, 
distance, catarrh, travelling, and hard work lrave begun — 
I may say so, now they are nearly all over — to tell heavily 
upon me. Sleeplessness besets me ; and if I had engaged 
to go on into May, I think I must have broken down." 
Indeed, but for his wonderful energy and the feeling of 
exultation which is derived from a heavy task nearly ac- 
complished, he would have had to follow the advice of 
" Longfellow and all the Cambridge men," and give in 
nearly at the last. But he persevered through the fare- 
well readings, both at Boston and at New York, though 
on the night before the last reading in America he told 
Dolby that if he " had to read but twice more, instead of 
once, lie couldn't do it." This last reading of all was 
given at New York on April 20, two days after a farewell 
banquet at Delmonico's. It was when speaking on this 
occasion that, very naturally moved by the unalloyed wel- 
come which had greeted him in whatever part of the 
States he had visited, he made the declaration already 
mentioned, promising to perpetuate his grateful sense of 
his recent American experiences. This apology, which 
was no apology, at least remains one amongst many 
proofs of the fact that with Dickens kindness never fell 
on a thankless soil. 

The merry month of May was still young in the Kent- 
ish fields and lanes when the master of Gad's II ill Place 
was home again at last. "I had not been at sea three 
days on the passage home," he wrote to his friend Mrs. 
Watson, " when I became myself again." It was, how- 
ever, too much when " a ' deputation ' — two in number, of 
whom only one could get into my cabin, while the oth- 
er looked in at my window — came to ask me to read to 



vi. J LAST YEARS. 179 

the passengers that evening in the saloon. I respectfully 
replied that sooner than do it I would assault the captain 
and be put in irons." Alas ! he was already fast bound, 
by an engagement concluded soon after he had arrived in 
Boston, to a final series of readings at home. " Farewell" 
is a difficult word to say for any one who has grown ac- 
customed to the stimulating excitement of a public stage, 
and it is not wonderful that Dickens should have wished 
to see the faces of his familiar friends — the English pub- 
lic — once more. But the engagement to which he had 
set his hand was for a farewell of a hundred readings, at 
the recompense of eight thousand pounds, in addition to 
expenses and percentage. It is true that he had done this 
before he had fully realized the effect of his American 
exertions ; but even so there was a terrible unwisdom in 
the promise. These last readings — and he alone is, in 
common fairness, to be held responsible for the fact — cut 
short a life from which much noble fruit might still have 
been expected for our literature, and which in any case 
might have been prolonged as a blessing beyond all that 
gold can buy to those who loved him. 

Meanwhile he had allowed himself a short respite be- 
fore resuming his labours in October. It was not more, 
his friends thought, than he needed, for much of his old 
buoyancy seemed to them to be wanting in him, except 
when hospitality or the intercourse of friendship called it 
forth. What a charm there still was in his genial humour 
his letters would suffice to show. It does one good to 
icad his description to his kind American friends Mr. and 
Mrs. Fields of his tranquillity at Gad's Hill : " Divers birds 
sdng here all day, and the nightingales all night. The 
place is lovely, and in perfect order. I have put five mir- 
rors in the Swiss chalet where I write, and they reflect and 



180 DICKENS. [chap. 

refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that are quivering 
at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the 
sail-dotted river. My room is up amongst the branches 
of the trees, and the birds and the butterflies fly in and 
out, and the green branches shoot in at the open windows, 
and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go 
with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, 
and indeed of everything that is growing for miles and 
miles, is most delicious." 

Part of this rare leisure he generously devoted to the 
preparation for the press of a volume of literary remains 
from the pen of an old friend. The Religious Opinions 
of Chauncey Hare Toionshend should not be altogether 
overlooked by those interested in Dickens, to whom the 
loose undogmatic theology of his friend commended itself 
as readily as the sincere religious feeling underlying it. I 
cannot say what answer Dickens would have returned to 
an enquiry as to his creed, but the nature of his religious 
opinions is obvious enough. Born in the Church of Eng- 
land, he had so strong an aversion from what seemed to 
him dogmatism of any kind, that he for a time — in 1843 
— connected himself with a Unitarian congregation ; and 
to Unitarian views his own probably continued during 
his life most nearly to approach. He described himself 
as " morally wide asunder from Rome," but the religious 
conceptions of her community cannot have been a matter 
of anxiojis enquiry with him, while he was too liberal- 
minded to be, unless occasionally, aggressive in his Protes- 
tantism. For the rest, his mind, though imaginative, wns 
without mystical tendencies, while for the transitory super- 
stitions of the day it was impossible but that he should 
entertain the contempt which they deserved. " Although," 
he writes — 



VI. J LAST YEARS. 181 

" I regard with a hushed and solemn fear the mysteries between 
which, and this state of existence, is interposed the barrier of the 
great trial and change that fall on all the things that live ; and, al- 
though I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything of 
them, I cannot reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing of bells, 
creaking of boards, and such like insignificances, with the majestic 
beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that I am per- 
mitted to understand." 



His piety was undemonstrative and sincere, as his books 
alone would suffice to prove ; and he seems to have sooght 
to impress upon his children those religious truths with 
the acceptance and practice of which he remained himself 
content. He loved the New Testament, and had, after 
some fashion of his own, paraphrased the Gospel narrative 
for the use of his children ; but he thought that " half 
the misery and hypocrisy of the Christian world arises 
from a stubborn determination to refuse the New Testa- 
ment as a sufficient guide in itself, and to force the Old 
Testament into alliance with it — whereof comes all man- 
ner of camel-swallowing and of gnat-straining." Of Pu- 
ritanism in its modern forms he was an uncompromising, 
and no doubt a conscientious, opponent ; and though, with 
perfect sincerity, he repelled the charge that his attacks 
upon cant were attacks upon religion, yet their animus is 
such as to make the misinterpretation intelligible. His 
Dissenting ministers are of the Bartholomew Fair species ; 
and though, in his later books, a good clergyman here and 
there makes his modest appearance, the balance can hard- 
ly be said to be satisfactorily redressed. 

The performance of this pious office was not the only 
kind act he did after his return from America. Of course, 
however, his own family was nearest to his heart. No 
kinder or more judicious words were ever addressed by a 



182 DICKENS. [chap. 

father to his children than those which, about this time, 
he wrote to one of his sons, then beginning a successful 
career at Cambridge, and to another — the youngest — who 
was setting forth for Australia, to join an elder brother 
already established in that country. "Poor Plorti," he 
afterward wrote, " is gone to Australia. It was a hard 
parting at the last. He seemed to me to become once 
more my youngest and favourite child as the day drew 
near, and I did not think I could have been so shaken." 

In October .his "farewell" readings began. He had 
never had his heart more in the work than now. Curious- 
ly enough, not less than two proposals had reached him 
during this autumn — one from Birmingham and the other 
from Edinburgh — that he should allow himself to be put 
forward as a candidate for Parliament; but he declined to 
entertain either, though in at least one of the two cases 
the prospects of success would not have been small. His 
views of political and parliamentary life had not changed 
since he had written to Bulwer Lytton in 1865: " Would 
there nut seem to be something horribly rotten in the sys- 
tem of political life, when one stands amazod how any 
man, not forced into it by his position, as you are, can 
bear to live it ?" Indeed, they had hardly changed since 
the days when he had come into personal contact with 
them as a reporter. In public and in private he had never 
ceased to ridicule our English system of party, and to ex- 
press his contempt for the Legislature and all its works. 
He had, however, continued to take a lively interest in 
public affairs, and his letters contain not a few shrewd 
remarks on both home and foreign questions. Like most 
liberal minds of his age, he felt a warm sympathy for the 
cause of Italy ; and the English statesman whom he ap- 
pears to have most warmly admired was Lord Russell, in 



vi. I LAST YEARS. 183 

whose good intentions neither friends nor adversaries were 
wont to lose faith. Meanwhile his Radicalism gradually 
became of the most thoroughly independent type, though 
it interfered neither with his approval of the proceedings 
in Jamaica as an example of strong government, nor with 
his scorn of "the meeting of jawbones and asses" held 
against Governor Eyre at Manchester. The political ques- 
tions, however, which really moved him deeply were those 
social problems to which his sympathy for the poor had 
always directed his attention — the Poor-law, temperance, 
Sunday observance, punishment and prisons, labour and 
strikes. On all these heads sentiment guided his judg- 
ment, but he spared no pains to convince himself that he 
was in the right; and he was always generous, as when, 
notwithstanding his interest in Household Words, he de- 
clared himself unable to advocate the repeal of the paper 
duty for a moment, " as against the soap duty, or any 
other pressing on the mass of the poor." 

Thus he found no difficulty in adhering to the course 
he had marked out for himself. The subject which now 
occupied him before all others was a scheme for a new 
reading, with which it was his wish to vary and to intensify 
the success of the series on which he was engaged. This 
was no other than a selection of scenes from Oliver Twist, 
culminating in the scene of the murder of Nancy by Sikes, 
which, before producing it in public, he resolved to " try " 
upon a select private audience. The trial was a brilliant 
success. " The public," exclaimed a famous actress who 
was present, " have been looking out for a sensation these 
last fifty years or so, and, by Heaven, they have got it !" 
Accordingly, from January, 18G9, it formed one of the 
most frequent of his readings, and the effort which it 
involved counted for much in the collapse which was to 



184 DICKENS. [chap. 

follow. Never were the limits between reading and acting- 
more thoroughly effaced by Dickens, and never was the 
production of an extraordinary effect more equally shared 
by author and actor. But few who witnessed this ex- 
traordinary performance can have guessed the elaborate 
preparation bestowed upon it, which is evident from the 
following notes (by Mr. C. Kent) on the book used in it 
by the reader: 

"What is as striking as anything in all this reading, however — 
that is, in the reading copy of it now lying before us as we write 
■ — is the mass of hints as to the by-play in the stage directions for 
himself, so to speak, scattered up and down the margin. 'Fagin 
raised his right hand, and shook his trembling forefinger in the air,' 
is there on page 101 in print. Beside it, on the margin in MS., is 
the word 'Action.'' Not a word of it was said. It was simply done. 
Again, immediately below that, on the same page — Sikcs loquitur: 
' Oh ! you haven't, haven't you ?' passing a pistol into a more conven- 
ient pocket (' Action ' again in MS. on the margin.) Not a word was 
said about the pistol. ... So again, afterwards, as a rousing self-direc- 
tion, one sees notified in MS. on page 107 the grim stage direction, 
' Murder coming ! ' " 

The "Murder" was frequently read by Dickens not less 
than four times a week during the early months of 1869, 
in which year, after beginning in Ireland, he had been 
continually travelling to and fro between various parts of 
Great Britain and town. Already in February the old 
trouble in his foot had made itself felt, but, as usual, it 
had long been disregarded. On the 10th of April he had 
been entertained at Liverpool, in St. George's Hall, at a 
banquet presided over by Lord Dufferin, and in a genial 
speech had tossed back the ball to Lord Houghton, who 
had pleasantly bantered him for his unconsciousness of 
the merits of the House of Lords. Ten days afterwards 



vi.] LAST YEAA«. 185 

he was to read at Preston, but, feeling uneasy about him- 
self, had reported his symptoms to his doctor in London. 
The latter hastened down to Preston, and persuaded Dick- 
ens to accompany him back to town, where, after a con- 
sultation, it was determined that the readings must be 
stopped for the current year, and that reading combined 
with travelling must never be resumed. What his sister- 
in-law and daughter feel themselves justified in calling 
" the beginning of the end" had come at last. 

With his usual presence of mind Dickens at once per- 
ceived the imperative necessity of interposing, " as it were, 
a fly-leaf in the book of my life, in which nothing should 
be written from without for a brief season of a few weeks." 
But he insisted that the combination of the reading and 
the travelling was alone to be held accountable for his 
having found himself feeling, "for the first time in my 
life, giddy, jarred, shaken, faint, uncertain of voice and 
sight and tread and touch, and dull of spirit." Mean- 
while, he for once kept quiet, first in London, and then at 
Gad's Hill. " This last summer," say those who did most 
to make it bright for him, " was a very happy one," and 
gladdened by the visits of many friends. On the retire- 
ment, also on account of ill-health, from All the Year 
Round of his second self, Mr. W. H. Wills, he was fortu- 
nately able at once to supply the vacant place by the ap- 
pointment to it of his eldest son, who seems to have in- 
herited that sense of lucid order which was amongst his 
father's most distinctive characteristics. He travelled very 
little this year, though in September he made a speech at 
Birmingham on behalf of his favourite Midland Institute, 
delivering himself, at its conclusion, of an antithetical Rad- 
ical commonplace, which, being misreported or misunder- 
stood, was commented upon with much unnecessary won- 
N 9 



186 DICKENS. [chap. 

dermenfc. With a view to avoiding the danger of exces- 
sive fatigue, the latter part of the year was chiefly devoted 
to writing in advance part of his new book, which, like 
Great Expectation's, was to grow up, and to be better for 
growing up, in his own Kentish home, and almost within 
sound of the bells of " Cloisterham " Cathedral. But the 
new book was never to be finished. 

The first number of The Mystery of Edwin Brood was 
not published till one more short series of twelve readings, 
given in London during a period extending from January 
to March, was at an end. lie had obtained Sir Thomas 
Watson's consent to his carrying out this wish, largely 
caused by the desire to compensate the Messrs. Chappell 
in some measure for the disappointment to which he had 
been obliged to subject them by the interruption of his 
longer engagement. Thus, though the Christmas of 1869 
had brought with it another warning of trouble in the 
foot, the year 1870 opened busily, and early in January 
Dickens established himself for the season at 5 Hyde Park 
Place. Early in the month he made another speech at 
Birmingham ; but the readings were strictly £onfined to 
London. On the other hand, it was not to be expected 
that the " Murder " would be excluded from the list. It 
was read in January to an audience of actors and actress- 
es ; and it is pleasant to think that he was able to testify 
to his kindly feeling towards their profession on one of 
the last occasions when he appeared on his own stage. 
"I set myself," he wrote, "to carrying out of themselves 
and their observation those who were bent on watching 
how the effects were got ; and, I believe, I succeeded. 
Coming back to it again, however, I feel it was madness 
ever to do it so continuously. My ordinary pulse is sev- 
enty-two, and it runs up under this effort to 'one hundred 



vi.] LAST YEARS. 187 

and twelve." Yet this fatal reading was repeated thrice 
more before the series closed, and with even more star- 
tling results upon the reader. The careful observations 
made by the physician, however, show that the excitement 
of his last readings was altogether too great for any man 
to have endured much longer. At last, on March 16, the 
night came which closed fifteen years of personal relations 
between the English public and its favourite author, such 
as are, after all, unparalleled in the history of our literature. 
His farewell words were few and simple, and referred with 
dignity to his resolution to devote himself henceforth ex- 
clusively to his calling as an author, and to his hope that 
in but two short weeks' time his audience "might enter/ 
in their own homes, on a new series of readings at which 
his assistance would be indispensable." 

Of the short time which remained to him his last book 
was the chief occupation ; and an association thus clings 
to the Mystery of Edwin Druod which would, in any case, 
incline us to treat this fragment — for it was to be no 
more — with tenderness. One would, indeed, hardly be 
justified in asserting that this story, like that which Thackr 
eray left behind him in the same unfinished state, bade 
fair to become a masterpiece in its author's later manner; 
there is much that is forced in its humour, while as to the 
working out of the chief characters our means of judg- 
ment are, of course, incomplete. The outline of the design, 
on the other hand, presents itself with tolerable clearness 
to the minds of most readers of insight or experience, 
though the story deserves its name of a mystery, instead 
of, like Our Mutual Friend, seeming merely to withhold 
a necessary explanation. And it must be allowed few 
pints have ever been more effectively laid than this, of 
which the untying will never be known. Three such per- 



188 DICKENS. [chap. 

sonages in relation to a deed of darkness as Jasper for its 
contriver, Durderi for its unconscious accomplice, and Dep- 
uty for its self-invited witness, and all so naturally connect- 
ing tliemselves with the locality of the perpetration of the 
crime, assuredly could not have been brought together ex- 
cept by one who had gradually attained to mastership in 
the adaptation of characters to the purposes of a plot. 
Still, the strongest impression left upon the reader of this 
fragment is the evidence it furnishes of Dickens having 
retained to the last powers which were most peculiarly 
and distinctively his own. Having skilfully brought into 
connexion, for the purposes of his plot, two such strange- 
ly-contrasted spheres of life and death as the cathedral 
close at " Cloisterham " and an opium-smoking den in 
one of the obscurest corners of London, he is enabled, by 
his imaginative and observing powers, not only to realise 
the picturesque elements in both scenes, but also to con- 
vert them into a twofold background, accommodating it- 
self to the most vivid hues of human passion. This is to 
bring out what he was wont to call "the romantic aspect 
of familiar things." With the physiognomy of Cloister- 
ham — otherwise Rochester— with its cathedral, and its 
" monastery " ruin, and its " Minor Canon Corner," and 
its " Nuns' House " — otherwise " Eastgate House," in the 
High Street — he was, of course, closely acquainted ; but 
he had never reproduced its features with so artistic a cun- 
ning, and the Mystery of Edwin Drood will always haunt 
Bishop Gundulph's venerable building and its tranquil pre- 
cincts. As for the opium-smoking, we have his own state- 
ment that what he described he saw — " exactly as he had 
described it, penny ink-bottle and all — down in Shadwell " 
in the autumn of 1869. "A couple of the Inspectors of. 
Lodging-houses knew the woman, and took me to her as 



vi. J LAST YEARS. 189 

I was making a round with them to see for myself the 
working of Lord Shaftesbury's Bill." Between these 
scenes John Jasper — a figure conceived with singular 
force — moves to and fro, preparing his mysterious design. 
No story of the kind ever began more finely ; and we may 
be excused from enquiring whether signs of diminished 
vigour of invention and freshness of execution are to be 
found in other and less prominent portions of the great 
novelist's last work. 

Before, in this year 1870, Dickens withdrew from Lon- 
don to Gad's Hill, with the hope of there in quiet carry- 
ing his all but half-finished task to its close, his health had 
not been satisfactory ; he had suffered from time to time 
in his foot, and his weary and aged look was observed by 
many of his friends. He was able to go occasionally into 
society ; though at the last dinner-party which he attend- 
ed — it was at Lord Houghton's, to meet the Prince of 
Wales and the King of the Belgians — he had been unable 
to mount above the dining-room floor. Already in March 
the Queen had found a suitable opportunity for inviting 
him to wait upon her at Buckingham Palace, when she 
had much gratified him by her kindly manner; and a few- 
days later he made his appearance at the levee. These ac- 
knowledgments of his position as an English author were 
as they should be; no others were offered, nor is it a mat- 
ter of regret that there should have been no titles to in- 
scribe on his tomb. He was also twice seen on one of 
those public occasions which no eloquence graced so read- 
ily and so pleasantly as his: once in April, at the dinner 
for the Newsvendcrs' Charity, when he spoke of the ex- 
istence among his humble clients of that "feeling of broth- 
erhood and sympathy which is worth much to all men, or 
they would herd with wolves; 1 ' and once in May — only a 



190 DICKENS. [chap. 

day or two before he went home into the country — when, 
at the Royal Academy dinner, he paid a touching tribute 
to the eminent painter, Daniel Maclise, who in the good 
old days had been much like a brother to himself. An- 
other friend and companion, Mark Lemon, passed" away a 
day or two afterwards ; and with the most intimate of all, 
his future biographer, he lamented the familiar faces of 
their companions — not one of whom had passed his six- 
tieth year — upon which they were not to look again. On 
the 30th of May he was once more at Gad's Hill. 

Here he forthwith set to work on his book, taking 
walks as usual, though of no very great length. On Thurs- 
day, the 9th of June, he had intended to pay his usual 
weekly visit to the office of his journal, and accordingly, 
on the 8th, devoted the afternoon as well as the morning 
to finishing the sixth number of the story. When he 
came across to the house from the chalet before dinner he 
seemed to his sister-in-law, who alone of the family was at 
home, tired and silent, and no sooner had they sat down 
to dinner than she noticed how seriously ill he looked. It 
speedily became evident that a fit was upon him. " Come 
and lie down," she entreated. " Yes, on the ground," he 
said, very distinctly — these were the last words he spoke — 
and he slid from her arm and fell upon the floor. He 
was laid on a couch in the room, and there he remained 
unconscious almost to the last. fyHe died at ten minutes 
past six on the evening of the 9th — by which time his 
daughters and his eldest son had been able to join the 
faithful watcher by his side ; his sister and his son Henry 
arrived when all was over. 

His own desire had been to be buried near Gad's Hill; 
though at one time he is said to have expressed a wish to 
lie in a disused graveyard, which is still pointed out, in a 



vi.] LAST YEARS. 191 

secluded corner in the moat of Rochester Castle. Prepa- 
rations had been made accordingly, when the Dean and 
Chapter of Rochester urged a request that his remains 
might be placed in their Cathedral. This was assented to; 
but at the last moment the Dean of Westminster gave ex- 
pression to a widespread wish that the great national 
writer might lie in the national Abbey. There he was 
buried on June 14, without the slightest attempt at the 
pomp which lie had deprecated in his will, and which he 
almost fiercely condemned in more than one of his writ- 
ings. " The funeral," writes Dean Stanley, whose own 
dust now mingles with that of so many illustrious dead, 
u was strictly private. It took place at an early hour in 
the summer morning, the grave having been dug in secret 
the night before, and the vast solitary space of the Abbey 
was occupied only by the small band of the mourners, and 
the Abbey clergy, who, without any music except the occa- 
sional peal of the organ, read the funeral service. For days 
the spot was visited by thousands. Many were the tears 
shed by the poorer visitors. He rests beside Sheridan, 
Garrick, and Henderson " — the first actor ever buried in 
the Abbey. Associations of another kind cluster near ; but 
his generous spirit would not have disdained the thought 
that he would seem even in death the players' friend. 

A plain memorial brass on the walls of Rochester 
Cathedral vindicates the share which the ancient city and 
its neighbourhood will always have in his fame. But 
most touching of all it is to think of him under the trees 
of his own garden on the hill, in the pleasant home where, 
after so many labours and so many wanderings, he died in 
peace, and as one who had earned his rest. 



CJTAPTER VII. 

THE FUTURE OF DICKENS's FAME. 

There is no reason whatever to believe that in the few 
years which have gone by since Dickens's death the de- 
light taken in his works throughout England and North 
America, as well as elsewhere, has diminished, or that he is 
not still one of our few most popular writers. The mere 
fact that his popularity has remained such since, nearly 
half a century ago, he, like a beam of spring sunshine, first 
made the world gay, is a sufficient indication of the influ- 
ence which he must have exercised upon his age. In our 
world of letters his followers have been many, though nat- 
urally enough those whose original genius impelled them to 
follow their own course soonest ceased to be his imitators. 
Amongst these I know no more signal instance than the 
great novelist whose surpassing merits he had very swiftly 
recognised in her earliest work. For though in the Scenes 
of Clerical Life George Eliot seems to be, as it were, hesi- 
tating between Dickens and Thackeray as the models of 
her humorous writing, reminiscences of the former are 
unmistakable in the opening of Amos Barton, in Mr. Gil- 
fiVs Love- Story, in Janets Repentance; and though it 
would be hazardous to trace his influence in the domestic 
scenes in Adam Bede, neither a Christmas exordium in 
one of the books of The Mill on the Floss, nor the Sam 



ciiAiwii.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 193 

Weller-like freshness of Bob Wakem in the same power- 
ful story, is altogether the author's own. Two of the 
most successful Continental novelists of the present day 
have gone to school with Dickens : the one the truly na- 
tional writer whose Debit and Credit, a work largely in 
the manner of his English model, has, as a picture of 
modern life, remained unexcelled in German literature;' 
the other, the brilliant Southerner, who may write as 
much of the History of his Books as his public may de- 
sire to learn, but who cannot write the pathos of Dickens 
altogether out of Jack, or his farcical fun out of Le Nqhah. 
And again — for I am merely illustrating, not attempting 
to describe, the literary influence of Dickens — who could 
fail to trace in the Californian studies and sketches of 
Bret Ilarte elements of humour and of pathos, to which 
that genuinely original author would be the last to deny 
that his great English "master" was no stranger? 

Yet popularity and literary influence, however wide and 
however strong, often pass away as they have come; and 
in no field of literature are there many reputations which 
the sea of time fails before very long to submerge. In 
prose fiction — a comparatively young literary growth — 
they are certainly not the most numerous, perhaps be- 
cause on works of this species the manners and style of an 
ago most readily impress themselves, rendering them pro- 
portionately strange to the ages that come after. In tl>e 
works of even the lesser playwrights who pleased the lib- 
eral times of Elizabeth, and in lyrics of even secondary 
merit that were admired by fantastic Caroline cavaliers, 

In the last volume of his magnum opus of historical fiction 
Gustav Frcytag describes "Boz" as, about the year 1840, filling with 
boundless enthusiasm the hearts of young men and maidens in a 
small Silesian country town. 
9* 



194 DICKENS. [chap. 

we can still take pleasure. But who can read many of 
the " standard " novels published as lately even as the 
days of George the Fourth ? The speculation is, there- 
fore, not altogether idle, whether Dickens saw truly when 
labouring, as most great men do labour, in the belief that 
his work was not only for a day. Literary eminence was 
the only eminence he desired, while it was one of the very 
healthiest elements in his character, that whatever he was, 
he was thoroughly. He would not have told any one, as 
Fielding's author told Mr. Booth at the sponging-house, 
that romance-writing " is certainly the easiest work in the 
world;" nor, being what he was, could he ever have found 
it such in his own case. " Whoever," he declared, " is de- 
voted to an art must be content to give himself wholly up 
to it, and to find his recompense in it." And not only 
did he obey his own labour-laws, but in the details of his 
work as a man of letters he spared no pains and no exer- 
cise of self-control. " I am," he generously told a begin- 
ner, to whom he was counselling patient endeavour, "an 
impatient and impulsive person myself, but it has been 
for many years the constant effort of my life to practise 
at my desk what I preach to you." Never, therefore has 
a man of letters had a better claim to be judged by his 
works. As he expressly said in his will, he wished for no 
other monument than his writings; and with their aid wo, 
who already belong to a new generation, and whose chil- 
dren will care nothing for the gossip and the scandal of 
which he, like most popular celebrities, was in his lifetime 
privileged or doomed to become the theme, may seek to 
form some definite conception of his future place among 
illustrious Englishmen. 

It would, of course, be against all experience to suppose 
that to future generations Dickens, as a writer, will be all 



vii.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 195 

that he was to his own. Much that constitutes the sub- 
ject, or at least furnishes the background, of his pictures 
of English life, like the Fleet Prison and the Marshalsea, 
has vanished, or is being improved off the face of the land. 
The form, again, of Dickens's principal works may become 
obsolete, as it was in a sense accidental. He was the 
most popular novelist of his day ; but should prose fiction, 
or even the full and florid species of it which has enjoyed 
so long-lived a favour ever be out of season, the popularity 
of Dickens's books must experience an inevitable diminu- 
tion. And even before that day arrives not all the works 
in a particular species of literature that may to a particu- 
lar age have seemed destined to live, will have been pre- 
served. Nothing is more surely tested by time than that 
originality which is the secret of a writer's continuing to 
be famous, and continuing to be read. 

Dickens was not — and to whom in these latter ages of 
literature could such a term be applied ? — a self-made 
writer, in the sense that he owed nothing to those who 
had gone before him. He was most assuredly no classical 
scholar — how could he have been ? But I should hesitate 
to call him an ill-read man, though he certainly was 
neither a great nor a catholic reader, and though he could 
not help thinking about Nicholas Nickleby while he was 
reading the Curse of Kehama. In his own branch of liter- 
ature his judgment was sound and sure-footed. It was, of 
course, a happy accident that as a boy he imbibed that 
taste for good fiction which is a thing inconceivable to 
the illiterate. Sneers have been directed against the pov- 
erty of his book-shelves in his earlier days of authorship ; 
but T fancy there were not many popular novelists in 
18.39 who would have taken down with them into the* 
country for a summer sojourn, as Dickens did to Peter- 



196 DICKENS. [chap. 

sham, not only a couple of Scott's novels, but Goldsmith, 
Swift, Fielding, Smollett, and the British Essayists ; nor 
is there one of these national classics — unless it he Swift 
— with whom Dickens's books or letters fail to show him 
to have been familiar. Of Goldsmith's books, he told 
Forster, in a letter which the biographer of Goldsmith 
modestly suppressed, he " had no indifferent perception — 
to the best of his remembrance — when little more than a 
child." He discusses with understanding the relative lit- 
erary merits of the serious and humorous papers in The 
Spectator ; and, with regard to another work of unique 
significance in the history of English fiction, Robinson 
Crusoe, he acutely observed that " one of the most popu- 
lar books on earth has nothing in it to make any one laugh 
or cry." " It is a book," he added, which he " read very 
much." It may be noted, by-the-way, that he was an at- 
tentive and judicious student of Hogarth ; and that thus 
his criticisms of humorous pictorial art rested upon as 
broad a basis of comparison as did his judgment of his 
great predecessors in English humorous fiction. 

Amongst these predecessors it has become usual to assert 
that Smollett exercised the greatest influence upon Dick- 
ens. It is no doubt true that in David Copperfield's library 
Smollett's books arc mentioned first, and in the greatest 
number, that a vision of Roderick Random and Strap 
haunted the very wicket-gate at Blunderstone, that the 
poor little hero's first thought on entering the King's 
Bench prison was the strange company whom Roderick 
met in the Marshalsea; and that the references to Smollett 
and his books are frequent in Dickens's other hooks and 
in his letters. Leghorn seemed to him " made illustrious" 
by Smollett's grave, and in a late period of his life he crit- 
icises his chief fictions with admirable justice. " Humphry 



vii.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. VJl 

Clinker," he writes, " is certainly Smollett's best. I am 
rather divided between Peregrine Pickle and Roderick Ran- 
dom, both extraordinarily good in their way, which is a 
way without tenderness ; but you will have to read them 
both, and I send the first volume of Peregrine as the richer 
of the two." An odd volume of Peregrine was one of the 
books with which the waiter at the Holly Tree Inn en- 
deavoured to beguile the lonely Christmas of the snovved- 
up traveller, but the latter " knew every word of it already." 
In the Lazy Tour, " Thomas, now just able to grope his 
way along, in a doubled-up condition, was no bad embodi- 
ment of Commodore Trunnion." I have noted, moreover, 
coincidences of detail which bear witness to Dickens's fa- 
miliarity with Smollett's works. To Lieutenant Bowling 
and Commodore Trunnion, as to Captain Cuttle, every man 
was a " brother," and to the Commodore, as to Mr. Small- 
weed, the most abusive substantive addressed to a woman 
admitted of intensification by the epithet " brimstone." I 
think Dickens had not forgotten the opening of the Ad- 
ventures of an Atom when he wrote a passage in the open- 
ing of his own Christmas Carol ; and that the characters 
of Tom Pinch and Tommy Traddles — the former more es- 
pecially — were not conceived without some thought of hon- 
est Strap. Furthermore, it was Smollett's example that 
probably suggested to Dickens the attractive jingle in the 
title of his Nicholas Nickleby. But these are for the most 
part mere details. The manner of Dickens as a whole 
resembles Fielding's more strikingly than Smollett's, as it 
was only natural that it should. The irony of Smollett is 
drier than was reconcilable with Dickens's nature ; it is 
only in the occasional extravagances of his humour that 
the former anticipates anything in the latter, and it is only 
the coarsest scenes of Dickens's earlier books — such as that 



198 DICKENS. [chap. 

between Noali, Charlotte, and Mrs. Sowerbery in Oliver 
Twist — which recall the whole manner of his predecessor. 
They resemble one another in their descriptive accuracy, 
and in the accumulation of detail by which they produce 
instead of obscuring vividness of impression ; but it was 
impossible that Dickens should prefer the general method 
of the novel of adventure pure and simple, such as Smollett 
produced after the example of Gil Bias, to the less crude 
form adopted by Fielding, who adhered to earlier and no- 
bler models. With Fielding's, moreover, Dickens's whole 
nature was congenial ; they both had that tenderness which 
Smollett lacked; and the circumstance that, of all English 
writers of the past, Fielding's name alone was given by 
Dickens to one of his sons, shows how, like so many of 
Fielding's readers, he had learnt to love him with an al- 
most personal affection. The very spirit of the author of 
Tom Jones — that gaiety which, to borrow the saying of a 
recent historian concerning Cervantes, renders even brutal- 
ity agreeable, and that charm of sympathetic feeling which 
makes us love those of his characters which he loves him- 
self — seem astir in some of the most delightful passages 
of Dickens's most delightful books. So in Pickwick, to 
begin with, in which, by the way, Fielding is cited with a 
twinkle of the eye all his own, and in Martin Chuzzlewit, 
where a chapter opens with a passage which is pure 
Fielding : 

" It was morning, and the beautiful Aurora, of whom so much hath 
been written, said, and sung, did, with her rosy fingers, nip and tweak 
Miss Pecksniff's nose. It was the frolicsome custom of the goddess, 
in her intercourse with the fair Cherry, to do so; or, in more prosaic 
phrase, the tip of that feature in the sweet girl's countenance was 
always very red at breakfast-time." 

Amongst the writers of Dickens's own age there were 



vii.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 199 

only two, or perhaps three, who in very different degrees 
and ways exercised a noticeable influence upon his writ- 
ings. He once declared to Washington Irving that he 
kept everything written by that delightful author upon 
" his shelves, and in his thoughts, and in his heart of 
hearts." And, doubtless, in Dickens's early days as an au- 
thor the influence of the American classic may have aided 
to stimulate the imaginative element in his English ad- 
mirers genius, and to preserve him from a grossness of 
humour into which, after the Sketches by Boz, he very 
rarely allowed himself to lapse. The two other writers 
were Carlyle, and, as I have frequently noted in previous 
chapters, the friend and fellow-labourer of Dickens's later 
manhood, Mr. Wilkie Collins. It is no unique experience 
that the disciple should influence the master; and in this 
instance, perhaps with the co-operation of the examples of 
the modern French theatre, which the two friends had 
studied in common, Mr. Wilkie Collins's manner had, I 
think, no small share in bringing about a transformation in 
that of Dickens. His stories thus gradually lost all traces 
of the older masters both in general method and in detail; 
whilst he came to condense and concentrate his effects in 
successions of skilfully-arranged scenes. Dickens's debt to 
Carlyle was, of course, of another nature ; and in his works 
the proofs are not few of his readiness to accept the teach- 
ings of one whom he declared he would " go at all times 
farther to see than any man alive." There was something 
singular in the admiration these two men felt for one an- 
other; for Carlyle, after an acquaintance of almost thirty 
years, spoke of Dickens as "a most cordial, sincere, clear- 
sighted, quietly decisive, just, and loving man ;" and there 
is not one of these epithets but seems well considered and 
well chosen. But neither Carlyle nor Dickens possessed a 



200 DICKENS. [chap. 

moral quality omitted in this list, the quality of patience, 
which abhors either "quietly" or loudly "deciding" a 
question before considering it under all its aspects, and 
in a spirit of fairness to all sides. The Latter-Day Pam- 
phlets, to confine myself to them/ like so much of the 
political philosophy, if it is to be dignified by that name, 
which in part Dickens derived from them, were at the 
time effective strokes of satirical invective ; now, their 
edge seems blunt and their energy inflation. Take the 
pamphlet on Model Prisons, with its summary of a theory 
which Dickens sought in every way to enforce upon his 
readers; or again, that entitled Downing Street, which set- 
tles the question of party government as a question of the 
choice between Buffy and Boodle, or, according to Carlylc, 
the Honourable Felix Parvulus and the Right Honourable 
Felicissimus Zero. The corrosive power of such sarcasms 
may be unquestionable; but the angry rhetoric pointed by 
them becomes part of the nature of those who habitually 
employ its utterance in lieu of argument ; and not a little 
of the declamatory element in Dickens, which no doubt at 
first exercised its effect upon a large number of readers, 
must be ascribed to his reading of a great writer who was 
often very much more stimulative than nutritious. 

Something, then, he owed to other writers, but it was lit- 
tle indeed in comparison with what he owed to his natural 
gifts. First amongst these, I think, must be placed what may, 
in a word, be called his sensibility — that quality of which 
humour, in the more limited sense of the word, and pathos 

1 The passage in Oliver Twist (chapter xxxvii.) which illustrates 
the maxim that " dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes are more 
questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine," may, or 
may not, be a reminiscence of Sartor Hesartus, then (1838) first pub- 
lished in a volume. 



vii.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 201 

are the twin products. And in Dickens both these were 
paramount powers, almost equally various in their forms 
and effective in their operation. According to M. Taine, 
Dickens, whilst he excels in irony of a particular sort, 
being an Englishman, is incapable of being gay. Such 
profundities are unfathomable to the readers of Pick- 
wick ; though the French critic may • have generalised 
from Dickens's later writings only. His pathos is not 
less true than various, for the gradations are marked be- 
tween the stern, tragic pathos of Hard Times, the melt- 
ing pathos of the Old Curiosity Sliop, Dombey and Son, 
and David Copperfield, and the pathos of helplessness 
which appeals to us in Smike and Jo. But this sensi- 
bility would not have given us Dickens's gallery of liv- 
ing pictures had it not been for the powers of imagina- 
tion and observation which enabled him spontaneously to 
exercise it in countless directions. To the way in which 
his imagination enabled him to identify himself with the 
figments of his own brain he frequently testified ; Dante 
was not more certain in his celestial and infernal topogra- 
phy than was Dickens as to " every stair in the little mid- 
shipman's house," and as to "every young gentleman's 
bedstead in Dr. Blimber's establishment." One particular 
class of phenomena may be instanced instead of many, in 
the observation and poetic reproduction of which his sin- 
gular natural endowment continually manifested itself — I 
mean those of the weather. It is not, indeed, often that 
he rises to a fine image like that in the description of the 
night in which Ralph Nickleby, ruined and crushed, slinks 
home to his death : 

" The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds 
furiously and fast before it. There was one black, gloomy mass 
that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the 
O 



202 DICKENS. [chap. 

others, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealth- 
ily on. He often looked back at this, and more than once stopped 
to let it pass over ; but, somehow, when he went forward again it 
was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shad- 
owy funeral train." 

But he again and again enables us to feel as if the Christ- 
mas morning on which Mr. Pickwick ran gaily down the 
slide, or as if the " very quiet" moonlit night in the midst 
of which a sudden sound, like the firing of a gun or a pis- 
tol, startled the repose of Lincoln's Inn Fields, were not 
only what we have often precisely experienced in country 
villages or in London squares, but as if they were the very 
morning and the very night which we must experience, if 
we were feeling the glow of wintry merriment, or the aw- 
ful chill of the presentiment of evil in a dead hour. In 
its lower form this combination of the powers of imagina- 
tion and observation has the rapidity of wit, and, indeed, 
sometimes is wit. The gift of suddenly finding out what 
a man, a thing, a combination of man and thing, is like — 
this, too, comes by nature ; and there is something electri- 
fying in its sudden exercise, even on the most trivial occa- 
sions, as when Flora, delighted with Little Dorrit's sudden 
rise to fortune, requests to know all 

" about the good, dear, quiet little thing, and all the changes of her 
fortunes, carriage people now, no doubt, and horses without number 
most romantic, a coat of arms, of course, and wild beasts on their 
hind legs, showing it as if it was a copy they had done with mouths 
from ear to ear, good gracious !" 

But Nature, when she gifted Dickens with sensibility, 
observation, and imagination, had bestowed upon him yet 
another boon in the quality which seems more prominent 
than any other in his whole being. The vigour of Dick- 
ens — a mental and moral vigour supported by a splendid 
physical organism — was the parent of some of his foibles ; 



vii.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 203 

amongst the rest, of his tendency to exaggeration. No 
fault has been more frequently found with his workman- 
ship than this; nor can he be said to have defended him- 
self very successfully on this head when he declared that 
he did " not recollect ever to have heard or seen the charge 
of exaggeration made against a feeble performance, though, 
in its feebleness, it may have been most untrue." But 
without this vigour he could not have been creative as he 
was; and in him there were accordingly united with rare 
completeness a swift responsiveness to the impulses of hu- 
mour and pathos, an inexhaustible fertility in discovering 
and inventing materials for their exercise, and the constant 
creative desire to give to these newly-created materials a 
vivid plastic form. 

And the mention of this last-named gift in Dickens 
suggests the query whether, finally, there is anything in 
his manner as a writer which may prevent the continuance 
of his extraordinary popularity. No writer can be great 
without a manner of his own ; and that Dickens had such 
a manner his most supercilious censurer will readily allow. 
His terse narrative power, often intensely humorous in its 
unblushing and unwinking gravity, and often deeply pa- 
thetic in its simplicity, is as characteristic of his manner as 
is the supreme felicity of phrase, in which he has no equal. 
As to the latter, I should hardly know where to begin and 
where to leave off were I to attempt to illustrate it. But, 
to take two instances of different kindte of wit, I may cite 
a passage in Glister's narrative of her interview with Lady 
Dedlock : " And so I took the letter from her, and she said 
she had nothing to give me; and I said I toas 'poor my- 
self, and consequently wanted nothing ;" and, of a different 
kind, the account in one of his letters of a conversation 
with Macready, in which the great tragedian, after a sol- 



204 DICKENS. [chap. 

eran but impassioned commendation of his friend's read- 
ing, " put his hand upon my breast and pulled out his 
pocket-handkerchief, and I felt as if I were doing some- 
body to his Werner.'''' These, I think, were amongst the 
most characteristic merits of his style. It also, and more 
especially in his later years, had its characteristic faults. 
The danger of degenerating into mannerism is incident to 
every original manner. There is mannerism in most of 
the great English prose-writers of Dickens's age — in Car; 
lyle, in Macaulay, in Thackeray — but in none of them is 
there more mannerism than in Dickens himself. In his 
earlier writings, in Nicholas Niekleby, for instance (I do 
not, of course, refer to the Portsmouth boards), and even 
in Martin. Chuzzlewit, there is much staginess; but in his 
later works his own mannerism had swallowed up that of 
the stage, and, more especially in serious passages, his style 
had become what M. Taine happily characterises as le style 
tourmente. His choice of words remained throughout ex- 
cellent, and his construction of sentences clear. He told 
Mr. Wilkie Collins that " underlining was not his nature;" 
and in truth he had no need to emphasise his expressions, 
or to bid the reader " go back upon their meaning." He 
recognised his responsibility, as a popular writer, in keep- 
ing the vocabulary of the language pure; and in Little 
Dorrit he even solemnly declines to use the French word 
trousseau. In his orthography, on the other hand, he was 
not free from Americanisms ; and his interpunctuation was 
consistently odd. But these are trifles; his more impor- 
tant mannerisms were, like many really dangerous faults of 
style, only the excess of characteristic excellences. Thus 
it was he who elaborated with unprecedented effect that 
humorous species of paraphrase which, as one of the most 
imitable devices of his style, has also been the most per- 



vir.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 205 

sistently imitated. We arc all tickled when Grip, the 
raven, " issues orders for the instant preparation of innu- 
merable kettles for purposes of tea;" or when Mr. Peck- 
sniff's eye is "piously upraised, with something of that 
expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a 
domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of 
an electric storm ;" but in the end the device becomes a 
mere trick of circumlocution. Another mannerism which 
grew upon Dickens, and was faithfully imitated by several 
of his disciples, was primarily due to his habit of turning 
a fact, fancy, or situation round on every side. This con- 
sisted in the reiteration of a construction, or of part of a 
construction, in the strained rhetorical fashion to which 
he at last accustomed us in spite of ourselves, but to 
which we were loath to submit in his imitators. These 
and certain other peculiarities, which it would be difficult 
to indicate without incurring the charge of hypcrcriticism, 
hardened as the style of Dickens hardened ; and, for in- 
stance, in the Tale of Two Cities his mannerisms may be 
seen side by side in glittering array. By way of compen- 
sation, the occasional solecisms and vulgarisms of his ear- 
lier style (he only very gradually ridded himself of the 
cockney habit of punning) no longer marred his pages ; 
and he ceased to break or lapse occasionally, in highly- 
impassioned passages, into blank verse. 

From first to last Dickens's mannerism, like everything 
which he made part of himself, was not merely assumed 
on occasion, but was, so to speak, absorbed into his nature. 
It shows itself in almost everything that he wrote in his 
later years, from the most carefully-elaborated chapters of 
his books down to the most deeply-felt passages of his 
most familiar correspondence, in the midst of the most 
genuine pathos and most exuberant humour of his books, 



200 DICKENS. [chap. 

and in the midst of the sound sense and unaffected piety 
of his private letters. Future generations may, for this 
very reason, be perplexed and irritated by what we merely 
stumbled at, and may wish that what is an element hard- 
ly separable from many of Dickens's compositions were 
away from them, as one wishes away from his signature 
that horrible flourish which in his letters he sometimes 
represents himself as too tired to append. 

But no distaste for his mannerisms is likely to obscure 
the" sense of his achievements in the branch of literature 
to which he devoted the full powers of his genius and the 
best energies of his nature. He introduced, indeed, no 
new species of prose fiction into our literature. In the 
historical novel he made two far from unsuccessful essays, 
in the earlier of which in particular — Barnaby Rudge — he 
showed a laudable desire to enter into the spirit of a past 
age; but he was without the reading or the patience of 
either the author of Waverley or the author of The Vir- 
ginians, and without the fine historic enthusiasm which 
animates the broader workmanship of Westward Ho. For 
the purely imaginative romance, on the other hand, of 
which in some of his works Lord Lytton was the most 
prominent representative in contemporary English litera- 
ture, Dickens's genius was not without certain affinities; 
but, to feel his full strength, he needed to touch the earth 
with his feet. Thus it is no mere phrase to say of him 
that he found the ideal in the real, and drew his inspira- 
tions from the world around him. Perhaps the strongest 
temptation which ever seemed likely to divert him from 
the sounder forms in which his masterpieces were cast 
lay in the direction of the novel with a purpose, the fiction 
intended primarily and above all things to promote the 
correction of some social abuse, or the achievement of 



vii. 1 THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 207 

some social reform. Bat in spite of himself, to whom the 
often voiceless cause of the suffering and the oppressed 
was at all times dearer than any mere literary success, he 
was preserved from binding his muse, as his friend Cruik- 
shank bound his art, handmaid in a service with which 
freedom was irreconcilable. His artistic instinct helped 
him in this, and perhaps also the consciousness that where, 
as in The Chimes or in Hard Times, he had gone furthest 
in this direction, there had been something jarring in the 
result. Thus, under the influences described above, he 
carried on the English novel mainly in the directions 
which it had taken under its early masters, and more 
especially in those in which the essential attributes of his 
own genius prompted him to excel. 

Amongst the elements on which the effect alike of the 
novelist's and of the dramatist's work must, apart from 
style and diction, essentially depend, that of construction 
is obviously one of the most significant. In this Dickens 
was, in the earlier period of his authorship, very far from 
strong. This was due in part to the accident that he be- 
gan his literary career as a writer of Sketches, and that his 
first continuous book, Pickivick, was originally designed as 
little more than a string of such. It was due in a still 
greater measure to the influence of those masters of Eng- 
lish fiction with whom he had been familiar from boy- 
hood, above all to Smollett. And though, by dint of his 
usual energy, he came to be able to invent a plot so gen- 
erally effective as that of A Tale of Two Cities, or, I was 
about to say, of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, yet on this 
head he had had to contend against a special difficulty ; I 
mean, of course, the publication of most of his books in 
monthly or even weekly numbers. In the case of a writer 
both pathetic and humorous the serial method of publica- 



208 DICKENS. [chap. 

tion leads the public to expect its due allowance of both 
pathos and humour every month or week, even if each 
number, to borrow a homely simile applied in Oliver Twist 
to books in general, need not contain " the tragic and the 
comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of 
red and white in a side of streaky bacon." And again, as 
in a melodrama of the old school, each serial division has, 
if possible, to close emphatically, effectively, with a prom- 
ise of yet stranger, more touching-, more laughable things 
to come. On the other hand, with this form of publica- 
tion repetition is frequently necessary by way of " remind- 
er "to indolent readers, whose memory needs refreshing 
after the long pauses between the acts. Fortunately, 
Dickens abhorred living, as it were, from hand to mouth, 
and thus diminished the dangers to which, I cannot help 
thinking, Thackeray at times almost succumbed. Yet, 
notwithstanding, in the arrangement of his incidents and 
the contrivance of his plots it is often impossible to avoid 
noting the imperfection of the machinery, or at least the 
traces of effort. I have already said under what influences, 
in my opinion, Dickens acquired a constructive skill which 
would have been conspicuous in most other novelists. 

If in the combination of parts the workmanship of 
Dickens was not invariably of the best, on the other hand 
in the invention of those parts themselves he excelled, 
his imaginative power and dramatic instinct combining to 
produce an endless succession of effective scenes and situ- 
ations, ranging through almost every variety of the pa- 
thetic and the humorous. In no direction was nature a 
more powerful aid to art with him than in this. From 
his very boyhood he appears to have possessed in a devel- 
oped form what many others may possess in its germ, the 
faculty of converting into a scene — putting, as it were* 



vir.J THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 209 

into a frame — personages that came under Lis notice, and 
the background on which he saw them. Who can forget 
the scene in David Copper field in which the friendless 
little boy attracts the wonderment of the good people of 
the public-house where — it being a special occasion — he 
has demanded a glass of their " very best ale, with a head 
to it?" In the autobiographical fragment already cited, 
where the story appears in almost the same words, Dickens 
exclaims : 

" Hero wo stand, .ill three, before me now, in my study in Devon- 
shire Terraoe. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the 
liar window-frame ; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, 
in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition." 

He saw the scene while he was an actor in it. Already 
the Sketches by Boz showed the exuberance of this power, 
and in his last years more than one paper in the delight- 
ful Uncommercial Traveller series proved it to be as inex- 
haustible as ever, while the art with which it was exercised 
had become more refined. Who has better described (for 
who was more sensitive to it?) the mysterious influence of 
erowds, and who the pitiful pathos of solitude? Who 
has ever surpassed Dickens in his representations, varied 
a thousandfold, but still appealing to the same emotions, 
common to us all, of the crises or turning-points of human 
life? Who has dwelt with a more potent effect on that 
catastrophe which the drama of every human life must 
reach ; whose scenes of death in its pathetic, pitif id, rev- 
erend, terrible, ghastly forms speak more to the imagina- 
tion and more to the heart ? There is, however, one spe- 
cies of scenes in which the genius of Dickens seems to me 
to exercise a still stronger spell — those which precede a 
catastrophe, which are charged like thunder-clouds with 
10 



210 DICKENS. [chap. 

the coming storm. And here the constructive art is at 
work; for it is the arrangement of the incidents, past and 
to come, combined by anticipation in the mind of the 
reader, which gives their extraordinary force to such scenes 
as the nocturnal watching of Nancy by Noah, or Carker's 
early walk to the railway station, where he is to meet his 
doom. Extremely powerful, too, in a rather different way, 
is the scene in Little Dorrit, described in a word or two, 
of the parting of Bar and Physician at dawn, after they 
have "found out Mr. Merdle's complaint:" 

" Before parting, at Physician's door, they both looked up at the 
sunny morning sky, into which the smoke of a few early fires, and 
the breath and voices of a few early stirrers, were peacefully rising, 
and then looked round upon the immense city and said: 'If all those 
hundreds and thousands of beggared people who were yet asleep 
could only know, as they two spoke, the ruin that impended over 
them, what a fearful cry against one miserable soul woidd go up to 
Heaven !' " 

Nor is it awe only, but pity also, which he is able thus 
to move beforehand, as in Dombey and Son, in the incom- 
parable scenes leading up to little Paul's death. 

More diverse opinions have been expressed as to Dick- 
ens's mastery of that highest part of the novelist's art, 
which we call characterisation. Undoubtedly, the charac- 
ters which he draws are included in a limited range. Yet 
I question whether their range can be justly termed nar- 
row as compared with that commanded by any other great 
English novelist except Scott, or with those of many nov- 
elists of other literatures except Balzac. But within his 
own range Dickens is unapproached. His novels do not 
altogether avoid the common danger of uninteresting he- 
roes and insipid heroines ; but only a very few of his 
heroes are conventionally declamatory like Nicholas Nick- 



vn.J THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 211 

Icby, and few of his heroines simper sentimentally like 
Rose Maylio. Nor can I for a moment assent to the con- 
demnation which has been pronounced upon all the female 
characters in Dickens's books, as more or less feeble or 
artificial. At the same time it is true that from women 1 
of a mightier mould Dickens's imagination turns aside; 
he could not have drawn a Dorothea Casaubon any more 
than he could have drawn Romola herself. Similarly, he- 
roes of the chivalrous or magnanimous type, representa- 
tives of generous effort in a great cause, will not easily be- 
met with in his writings : he never even essayed the pict- 
ure of an artist devoted to Art for her own sake. 

It suited the genius, and in later years perhaps the 
temper, of Dickens as an author to leave out of sight 
those "public virtues" to which no man was in truth less 
blind than himself, and to remain content with the illus- 
tration of types of the private or domestic kind. We 
may cheerfully take to us the censure that our great hu- 
mourist was in nothing more English than in this — that 
Ids sympathy with the affections of the hearth and the 
home knew almost no bounds. A symbolisation of this 
may be found in the honour which, from the Sketches and 
Pickwick onwards, through a long series of Christmas 
books and Christmas numbers, Dickens, doubtless very 
consciously, paid to the one great festival of English 
family life. Yet so far am I from agreeing with those 
critics who think that lie is hereby lowered to the level of 
the poets of the teapot and the plum-pudding, that I am 
at a loss how to express my admiration for this side of 
his genius — tender with the tenderness of Cowper, playful 
with the playfulness of Goldsmith, natural with the natu- 
ralness of the author of Amelia. Who was ever more at 
home with children than he, and, for that matter, with 



212 DICKENS. [chap. 

babies to begin with ? Mr. Home relates how he once 
heard a lady exclaim : " Oh, do read to us about the 
baby ; Dickens is capital at a baby !" Even when most 
playful, most farcical concerning children, his fun is rarely 
without something of true tenderness, for he knew the 
meaning of that dreariest solitude which he has so often 
pictured, but nowhere, of course, with a truthfulness going 
so straight to the heart as in David Copperjicld — the soli- 
tude of a child left to itself. Another wonderfully true 
child-character is that of Pip, in Great Expectations, who 
is also, as his years progress, an admirable study of boy- 
nature. For Dickens thoroughly understood what that 
mysterious variety of humankind really is, and was al- 
ways, if one may so say, on the lookout for him. He 
knew him in the brightness and freshness which makes 
true ingenus of such delightful characters (rare enough in 
fiction) as Walter Gay and Mrs. Lirriper's grandson. Pie 
knew him in his festive mood — witness the amusing letter 
in which he describes a water-expedition at Eton with his 
son and two of his irrepressible school-fellows. He knew 
him in his precocity — the boy of about three feet high, at 
the "George and Vulture," " in a hairy cap and fustian over- 
alls, whose garb bespoke a laudable ambition to attain in 
time the elevation of an hostler ;" and the thing on the 
roof of the Ilarnsburg coach, which, when the rain was 
over, slowly upreared itself, and patronisingly piped out 
the enquiry : " Well, now, stranger, I guess you find this 
a'most like an English arternoon, hey ?" He knew the 
Gavroche who danced attendance on Mr. Quilp at his 
wharf, and those strangest, but by no means least true, 
types of all, the pupil-teachers in Mr. Fagin's academy. 

But these, with the exception of the last-named, which 
show much shrewd and kindly insight into the paradoxes 



vn.J THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 213 

of human nature, are, of course, the mere croquis of the 
great humourist's pencil. His men and women, and the 
passions, the desires, the loves, and hatreds that agitate 
them, he has usually chosen to depict on that background 
of domestic life which is in a greater or less degree com- 
mon to us all. And it is thus also that he has secured to 
himself the vast public which vibrates very differently from 
a mere class or section of society to the touch of a popu- 
lar speaker or writer. " The more," he writes, " we see of 
life and its brevity, and the world and its varieties, the 
more we know that no exercise of our abilities in any art, 
but the addressing of it to the great ocean of humanity in 
which we are drops, and not to by-ponds (very stagnant) 
here and there, ever can or ever will lay the foundations 
of an endurable retrospect." The types of character which 
in his fictions he chiefly delights in reproducing are accord- 
ingly those which most of us have opportunities enough 
of comparing with the realities around us ; and this test, 
a sound one within reasonable limits, was the test he de- 
manded. To no other author were his own characters evey 
more real ; and Forster observes that " what be had most to 
notice in Dickens at the very outset of his career was his 
indifference to any praise of his performances on the merely 
literary side, compared with the higher recognition of them 
as bits of actual life, with the meaning and purpose, on 
their part, and the responsibility on his, of realities, rather 
than creations of fancy." It is, then, the favourite growths 
of our own age and country for which we shall most readily 
look in his works, and not look in vain : avarice and prod- 
igality ; pride in all its phases; hypocrisy in its endless 
varieties, unctuous and plausible, fawning and self-satisfied, 
formal and moral ; and, on the other side, faithfulness, 
simplicity, long-suffering patience, and indomitable heroic 



214 DICKENS. [chap. 

good-humour. Do we not daily make room on the pave- 
ment for Mr. Dombey, erect, solemn, and icy, along-side of 
whom in the road Mr. Carker deferentially walks his sleek 
horse? Do we nut know mure than one Anthony Chuz- 
zlewit laying up money for himself and his son, and a 
curse for both along with it; and many a Richard Gars- 
ton, sinking, sinking, as the hope grows feebler that Justice 
or Fortune will at last help one who has not learnt how to 
help himself? And will nut prodigals of a more buoyant 
kind, like the immortal Mr. Micawber (though, maybe, with 
an eloquence less ornate than his), when their boat is on 
the shore and their bark is on the sea, become " perfectly 
business-like and perfectly practical," and propose, in ac- 
knowledgment of a parting gift we had neither hoped nor 
desired to see again, " bills" or, if. we should prefer it, 
"a bond, or any other description of security?" All this 
will happen to us, as surely as we shall be buttonholed 
by Pecksniffs in a state of philanthropic exultation ; and 
watched round corners by 'umble but observant Uriah 
Ileeps; and affronted in what is best in us by the worst 
hypocrite of all, the hypocrite of religion, who flaunts in 
our eyes his greasy substitute for what he calls the "light 
of terewth." To be sure, unless it be Mr. Chadband and 
those of his tribe, we shall find the hypocrite and the man- 
out-at-elbows in real life less endurable than their repre- 
sentatives in fiction; for Dickens well understood "that 
if you do not administer a disagreeable character carefully, 
the public have a decided tendency to think that the story 
is disagreeable, and not merely the fictitious form." His 
ecouomy is less strict with characters of the opposite class, 
true copies of Nature's own handiwork — the Tom finches 
and Trotty Vecks and Clara Peggottys, who reconcile us 
with our kind, and Mr. Pickwick himself, "a human being 



vii.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 215 

replete with benevolence," to borrow a phrase from a noble 
passage in Dickens's most congenial predecessor. These 
characters in Dickens have a warmth which only the cre- 
ations of Fielding and Smollett had possessed before, and 
which, like these old masters, he occasionally carries to 
excess. At the other extreme stand those characters 
in which the art of Dickens, always in union with the 
promptings of his moral nature, illustrates the mitigating 
or redeeming qualities observable even in the outcasts of 
our civilisation. To me his figures of this kind, when 
they are not too intensely elaborated, are not the least 
touching; and there is something as pathetic in the un- 
couth convict Magwitch as in the consumptive crossing- 
sweeper Jo. 

As a matter of course it is possible to take exceptions 
of one kind or another to some of the characters created 
by Dickens in so extraordinary a profusion. I hardly 
know of any other novelist less obnoxious to the charge of 
repeating himself; though, of course, many characters in 
his earlier or shorter works contained in themselves the 
germs of later and fuller developments. But Bob Saw- 
yer and Dick Swiveller, Noah Claypole and Uriah Heep 
are at least sufficiently independent variations on the same 
themes. On the other hand, Filer and Cute in The Chimes 
were the first sketches of Gradgrind and Bounderby in 
Hani Times; and Clemency in The Battle of Life prefig- 
ures Peggotty in David Copperfield. No one could seri- 
ously quarrel with such repetitions as these, and there are 
remarkably few of them ; for the fertile genius of Dickens 
took delight in the variety of its creativeness, and, as if 
to exemplify this, there was no relation upon the contrast- 
ed humours of which he better loved to dwell than that of 
partnership. It has been seen how rarely his inventive 



216 DICKENS. [chap. 

power condescended to supplement itself by what in the 
novel corresponds to the mimicry of the stage, and what 
in truth is as degrading to the one as it is to the other — 
the reproduction of originals from real life. On the other 
hand, he carries his habit too far of making a particular 
phrase do duty as an index of a character. This trick also 
is a trick of the stage, where it often enough makes the 
judicious grieve. Many may be inclined to censure it in 
Dickens as one of several forms of the exaggeration which 
is so frequently condemned in him. There was no charge 
to which he was more sensitive ; and in the preface to 
Martin Chuzzleivit he accordingly (not for the first time) 
turned round upon the objectors, declaring roundly that 
" what is exaggeration to one class of minds and percep- 
tions is plain truth to another ;" and hinting a doubt 
" whether it is always the writer who colours highly, or 
whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for 
colour is a little dull." I certainly do not think that the 
term " exaggerated " is correctly applied to such conven- 
tional characters of sensational romance as Rosa Dartle, 
who has, as it were, lost her way into David Copperfidd, 
while Hortense and Madame Defarge seem to be in- their 
proper places in Bleak House ami A Tale of Two Cities. 
In his earlier writings, and in the fresher and less over- 
charged serious parts of his later books, he rarely if ever 
paints black in black; even the Jew Fagin has a moment, 
of relenting against the sleeping Oliver; he is not that un- 
real thing, a " demon," whereas Sikes is that real thing, a 
brute. On the other hand, certainly he at times makes his 
characters more laughable than nature ; few great humour- 
ists have so persistently sought to efface the line which 
separates the barely possible from the morally probable. 
This was, no doubt, largely due to his inclination towards 



vii. ! THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 217 

the grotesque, which a severer literary training might have 
taught him to restrain. Thus he liked to introduce insane 
or imbecile personages into fiction, where, as in real life, 
they are often dangerous to handle. It is to his sense of 
the grotesque, rather than to any deep-seated satirical in- 
tention, and certainly not to any want of reverence or piety 
in his very simple and very earnest nature, that I would 
likewise ascribe the exaggeration and unfairness of which 
he is guilty against Little Bethel and all its works. But 
in this, as in other instances, no form of humour requires 
more delicate handling than the grotesque, and none is 
more liable to cause fatigue. Latterly, Dickens was always 
adding to his gallery of eccentric portraits, and if inner 
currents may be traced by outward signs, it may be worth 
while to apply the test of his names, which become more 
and more odd as their owners deviate more and more from 
the path of nature. Who more simply and yet more hap- 
pily named than the leading members of the Pickwick 
( Jlub — from the poet, Mr. Snodgrass, to the sportsman, Mr. 
Winkle — -Nathaniel, not Daniel ; but with Veneering and 
Lammle, and Boffin and Venus, and Crisparkle and Grew- 
gious ; — be they actual names or not — we feel instinctively 
that we arc in the region of the transnormal. 

Lastly, in their descriptive power and the faithfulness 
with which they portray the life and ways of particular 
periods or countries, of special classes, professions, or other 
divisions of mankind, the books of Dickens are, again of 
course within their range, unequalled. He sought his ma- 
terials chiefly at home, though his letters from Italy and 
Switzerland and America, and his French pictures in sketch 
and story, show how much wider a field his descriptive 
powers might have covered. The Sketches by Bos and 
the Pickwick Papers showed a mastery, unsurpassed before 

r 10* 



218 DICKENS. [chap. 

or since, in the description of the life of English society 
in its middle and lower classes, and in Oliver Twist he 
lifted the curtain from some of the rotten parts of our 
civilisation. This history of a work-house child also sound- 
ed the note of that sympathy with the poor which gave 
to Dickens's descriptions of their sufferings and their strug- 
gles a veracity beyond mere accuracy of detail. He was 
still happier in describing their household virtues, their 
helpfulness to one another, their compassion for those who 
are the poorest of all — the friendless and the outcast — as 
he did in his Old Curiosity Shop, and in most of his 
Christmas books. His pictures of middle-class life abound- 
ed in kindly humour; but the humour and pathos of pov- 
erty — more especially the poverty which has not yet lost 
its self-respect — commended themselves most of all to his 
descriptive power. Where, as in Nicholas Nickleby and 
later works, he essayed to describe the manners of the 
higher classes, he was, as a rule, far less successful; partly 
because there was in his nature a vein of rebellion against 
the existing system of society, so that, except in his latest 
books, he usually approached a description of members of 
its dominant orders with a satirical intention, or at least 
an undertone of bitterness. At the same time I demur to 
the common assertion that Dickens could not draw a real 
gentleman. All that can be said is that it very rarely 
suited his purpose to do so, supposing the term to include 
manners as well as feelings and actions ; though Mr. 
Twemlow, in Our Mutual Friend, might be instanced as 
a (perhaps rather conscious) exception of one kind, and 
Sir Leicester Dedlock, in the latter part of Bleak House, 
as another. Moreover, a closer examination of Lord Fred- 
crick Verisopht and Cousin Feenix will show that, gull as 
the one and ninny as the other is, neither has anything 



vii.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 219 

that can be called ungcntleinanly about him ; on the con- 
trary, the characters, on the whole, rather plead in favour 
of the advantage than of the valuelessness of blue blood. 
As for Dickens's other noblemen, whom I find enumerated 
in an American dictionary of his characters, they are nearly 
all mere passing embodiments of satirical fancies, which 
pretend to be nothing more. 

Another ingenious enthusiast has catalogued the nu- 
merous callings, professions, and trades of the personages 
appearing in Dickens's works. I cannot agree with the 
criticism that in his personages the man is apt to become 
forgotten in the externals of his calling — the barrister's 
wig and gown, as it were, standing for the barrister, and 
the beadle's cocked hat and staff for the beadle. But he 
must have possessed in its perfection the curious detective 
faculty of deducing a man's occupation from his manners. 
To him nothing wore a neutral tint, and no man or woman 
was featureless. He was, it should be remembered, always 
observing ; half his life he was afoot. When he under- 
took to describe any novel or unfamiliar kind of manners, 
he spared no time or trouble in making a special study of 
his subject. He was not content to know the haunts of 
the London thieves by hearsay, or to read the history of 
opium-smoking and its effects in Blue-books. From the 
office of his journal in London we find him starting on 
these self-imposed commissions, and from his hotel in New 
York. The whole art of descriptive reporting, which has 
no doubt produced a large quantity of trashy writing, but 
lias also been of real service in arousing a public interest 
in neglected corners of our social life, was, if not actually 
set on foot, at any rate re-invigorated and vitalised by him. 
No one was so delighted to notice the oddities which 
habit and tradition stereotype in particular classes of men. 



220 DICKENS. [chap. 

A complete natural history of the country actor, the Lon- 
don landlady, and the British waiter might be compiled 
from his pages. This power of observation and descrip- 
tion extended from human life to that of animals. His 
habits of life could not but make him the friend of dogs, 
and there is some reason for a title which was bestowed 
on him in a paper in a London magazine concerning his 
own dogs — the Landseer of Fiction. His letters are full 
of delightful details concerning these friends and com- 
panions, Turk, Linda, and the rest of them ; nor is the 
family of their fictitious counterparts, culminating (intel- 
lectually) in Merry legs, less numerous and delightful. 
Cats were less congenial to Dickens, perhaps because he 
had no objection to changing house ; and they appear in 
his works in no more attractive form than as the attendant 
spirits of Mrs. Pipchin and of Mr. Krook. But for the 
humours of animals in general he had a wonderfully quick 
eye. Of his ravens I have already spoken. The pony 
Whisker is the type of kind old gentlemen's ponies. In 
one of his letters occurs an admirably droll description 
of the pig-market at Boulogne ; and the best unscientific 
description ever given of a spider was imagined by Dick- 
ens at Broaclstairs, when in his solitude he thought 

" of taming spiders, as Baron Trenck did. There is one in my cell 
(with a speckled body and twenty-two very decided knees) who seems 
to know me." 

In everything, whether animate or inanimate, he found 
out at once the characteristic feature, and reproduced it in 
words of faultless precision. This is the real secret of his 
descriptive power, the exercise of which it would be easy 
to pursue through many other classes of subjects. Sce- 
nery, for its own sake, he rarely cared to describe ; but no 



mi.] THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. 221 

one better understood how to reproduce the combined ef- 
fect of scenery and weather on the predisposed mind. 
Thus London and its river in especial are, as I have said, 
haunted by the memory of Dickens's books. To me it 
was for years impossible to pass near London Bridge at 
night, or to idle in the Temple on summer days, or to fre- 
quent a hundred other localities on or near the Thames, 
without instinctively recalling pictures scattered through 
the works of Dickens — in this respect, also, a real liber 
veritatis. 

Thus, and in many ways which it would be labour lost 
to attempt to describe, and by many a stroke or touch of 
genius which it would be idle to seek to reproduce in para- 
phrase, the most observing and the most imaginative of 
our English humourists revealed to us that infinite multi- 
tude of associations which binds men together, and makes 
us members one of another. But though observation and 
imagination might discern and discover these associations, 
sympathy — the sympathy of a generous human heart with 
humanity — alone could breathe into them the warmth of 
life. Happily, to most men, there is one place consecrated 
above others to the feelings of love and good-will ; " that 
great altar where the worst among us sometimes perform 
the worship of the heart, and where the best have offered 
up such sacrifices and done such deeds of heroism as, 
chronicled, would put the proudest temples of old time, 
with all their vaunting annals, to the blush." It was thus 
that Dickens spoke of the sanctity of home ; and, English in 
many things, he was most English in that love of home to 
which he was never weary of testifying. But, though the 
"pathway of the sublime" may have been closed to him, 
he knew well enough that the interests of a people and 
the interests of humanity are mightier than the domestic 



222 DICKENS. [chap. vii. 

loves and cares of any man ; and he conscientiously ad- 
dressed himself, as to the task of his life, to the endeavour 
to knit humanity together. The method which he, by in- 
stinct and by choice, more especially pursued was that of 
seeking to show the "good in everything." This it is 
that made him, unreasonably sometimes, ignobly never, the 
champion of the poor, the helpless, the outcast. He was 
often tempted into a rhetoric too loud and too shrill, into 
a satire neither fine nor fair ; for he was impatient, but not 
impatient of what he thought true and good. His pur- 
pose, however, was worthy of his powers ; nor is there re- 
corded among the lives of English men of letters any more 
single-minded in its aim, and more successful in the pur- 
suit of it, than his. He was much criticised in his life- 
time ; and he will, I am well aware, be often criticised in 
the future by keener and more capable judges than myself. 
They may miss much in his writings that I find in them ; 
but, unless they find one thing there, it were better that 
they never opened one of his books. He has indicated it 
himself when criticising a literary performance by a clever 
writer : 

" In this little MS. everything is too much patronised and conde- 
scended to, whereas the slightest touch of feeling for the rustic who 
is of the earth earthy, or of sisterhood with the homely servant who 
has made her face shine in her desire to please, would make a differ- 
ence that the writer can generally imagine without trying it. You 
don't want any sentiment laboriously made out in such a thing. You 
don't want any maudlin show of it. But you do want a pervading 
suggestion that it is there." 

The sentiment which Dickens means is the salt which 
will give a fresh savour of their own to his works so long 
as our language endures. 

THE END. 



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Harper's Weekly, Harper's Bazar, and Harper's Young People 
render them advantageous mediums for advertising. A limited number 
of suitable advertisements will be inserted at the following rates :— In the 
Magazine, Fourth Cover Page, $1500 00 ; Third Cover Page, or First 
Page of advertisement sheet, $500 00; one-half of such page when whole 
page is not taken, $300 00; one-quarter of such page when whole page is 
not taken, $150 00; an Inside Page of advertisement sheet, $250 00; one- 
half of such page, $150 00; one -quarter of such page, $75 00; smaller 
cards on an inside page, per line, $2 00: in the Weekly, Outside Page. 
$2 00 a line ; Inside Pages, $1 50 a line : in the Bazar, $1 00 a line : in the 
Young People, Cover Pages, 50 cents a line. Average : eight words to a 
line, twelve lines to an inch. Cuts and display charged the same rates for 
space occupied as solid matter. Remittances should be made by Post- 
Office Money Order or Draft, to avoid chance of loss. 

Address : HARPER & BROTHERS, 

Franklin Square, New York. 



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